GA-990FXA-UD5 Living Review

[Dark Mantis]

Yes all the onboard buttons are useful but the Clear CMOS button usually won't be suficient to clear it properly and you will still have to resort to removing the battery etc.

[teknology9]

Thanks for the info DM and here comes a newbie question!!!  How do you get the OS on a pen drive, is it a download from the microsoft site?


Thanks,

Teknology9

[Dark Mantis]

I believe that it is downloadable but you can make your own just by formatting a USB drive and then making it bootable before copying the Windows install files to it off your disk.

[derobert]

Shame I would have been interested in how the two 4890s benched compared to some of the new cards.

ah i am so sorry for my rush on that. I have 6950 now But i do remember that in Future mark vantage, in performance mode with resolution changed to my native 1680x1050 i had ~14500 gpu score. Hope this helps

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Thanks for the update and info. It was not important just a case of interested how one would compare against the other.

[absic]

I have just added some information with regard to the Marvell 88SE9172 SATA Controller here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,5704.msg45817.html#msg45817

[absic]

And I have gone through setting up a RAID Array on the Marvell SATA Controller here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,5704.msg45818.html#msg45818

[bw]

990FXA-UD5 is my 1st AMD board for maybe 4 years and I'm really happy to see how it's running. No problems with stability etc but there are still some issues that are comming back in different topics like unlocking cpu cores and amd raid performance. Have hope that both will be solved soon and for now just wanted to share with some results. Screenshots from my 24/7 pc , running like that for 2 weeks now ( Raid 0 on 2x M4 64GB / write back ).
Just 1 question if anyone was trying to set memory stable @2000 or more on this board ? I'm using 4x 2GB Dominators GT 2000C8 that are making up to 2250 on P67 boards but here no luck with more than ~1800.

[absic]

Hi there,

The higher specified RAM Speeds are really only going to be applicable to the new AM3+ Processors when they come along as the memory controllers on theseshouldl be able to run at 1866MHz by default.

If you are running an AM3 processor then you need to be careful about running your RAM above 1333MHz. Check here for more info on that: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2515.0.html

[absic]

Just added a little more light reading to this review here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,5704.msg45819.html#msg45819

It's some figures I got from testing the AMD and Marvell controllers with a couple of ADATA 60GB S511 6GB/s SSD's.

[bw]

Thanks for update, it can save me some time trying Marvell that I still didn't touch
Your read transfers seem low but I saw others with similar results on Agility 3 60GB so maybe it's ok for SF controller ...  did you try RAIDXpert array settings like NCQ ( it's disabled by default or at least I had it after setting raids on ssd ) , cache options etc ?  I noticed that while using no cache/write through I have sometimes better read/sequential transfers but all other are much lower. While using Read Cache/Write Back most transfers are best. Read Ahead gives a bit better sequential read transfers than Read Cache option but sometimes can notice drop in write transfers or 512k Crystal test.
I have to test again my raid on MS drivers as your max transfers are much better than on AMD driver. This driver is just asking fo update   It's good to see that's not controller limitation.

Added my single M4/64GB result ( producers declared is 415/95 MB/s )

Edit:
Now I noticed that there is new version of AMD RAID driver http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx
Did you try latest in your tests ? ( can't find info about it )

[absic]

Hi there,

for some reason I couldn't get AMD RaidXpert to run properly and put it down to not having installed the AMD Drivers. Also, I am not sure as to why I was getting the lower read speeds than I had anticipated from the ADATA drive(s) but, as I said, this is my first proper hands-on experience with SSD's so I'm still learning.

[ferjero989]

hello there
im looking for a board with 6+2 Sata ports.
my plan is raid 0 with 2x ssd drives and a raid 5 with 6x500gb drives
will all 6 sata ports in this board support such config, cuz i noticed that the bios puts the 4/5 sata port a a separated set for dvdroms or drives that are not part of the raid.

also, any recomendations for ssd drives, just for windows and regular apps, my games will be installed on the raid 5.
i read about ppl having problems getting the marvel to recognize SOME specific ssd drives
so far my choice was SLD3-25SAT3-60G

[absic]

Hi there,
I'm sorry to say this but I don't think the GA-990FXA-UD5 will be fit for what you are planning to do.

If you are looking for a motherboard with AM3+ support and the features you are needing then I would suggest you take a closer look at the GA-890FXA-UD5 rev 3.1 as this board would do a better job. You can check it out here: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3781&dl=1#ov

[bw]

...
also, any recomendations for ssd drives, just for windows and regular apps, my games will be installed on the raid 5.
i read about ppl having problems getting the marvel to recognize SOME specific ssd drives
so far my choice was SLD3-25SAT3-60G

I'm not recommending OCZ/Sandforce SSD as many people have problems with stability on different boards. All that you read in the web, different reviews etc are just fast bandwidth tests where noone will say straight that all is stable but all will show best sequential transfers. I had Agility 3 60GB and after 1 month fighting with it and 1 month RMA i changed it to Crucial M4. Now I have 2x M4 64GB running in RAID without any problems on 2nd board. I'm not saying that all OCZ/Sandforce ssd are faulty, its more firmware issue that still haven't been fixed right. Some users are saying that all is working fine but with different luck your system can hang up or give blue screens from time to time. Issues are mainly with new Intel chipsets but AMD users were also complaining. Read some more on OCZ forums before you decide.
Generally you will see biggest boost in games installing them on SSD so optimal seems games+system on ssd and other stuff on hdd. You can always get 1x 120GB SSD ( should be faster in random transfers than 2x 60GB ) + 3x 1TB HDD in RAID5 or just 4x 1TB in RAID10 ( that is faster than RAID5 ).