All three motherboards support multiplier ranges that exceed the potential of any hardware available today, and all three support high voltage levels that exceed our cooling solution. Rather than tempt fate with some form of exotic cooling that wouldn't represent real-world use, we made this a comparison an average builder can rely on. Sunbeam’s Core Contact Freezer serves cooling duties.

We don’t see any large differences in CPU overclocking capability, but the M5A99FX Pro R2.0’s win is valid regardless of margin. More impressive is the integrated northbridge clock rate, which pushes well past ASRock's effort and hints at trouble for Gigabyte's platform.

That trouble shows up as moderate DRAM data rate limits, since the FX processor’s integrated northbridge operates only at frequencies that exceed the DRAM data rate. Asus widens its lead over ASRock here, at least when two modules are installed.
- Performance Beats Features?
- ASRock 990FX Extreme9
- 990FX Extreme9 Software
- 990FX Extreme9 Firmware
- Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0
- M5A99FX Pro R2.0 Software
- M5A99FX Pro R2.0 Firmware
- Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
- 990FXA-UD3 Software
- 990FXA-UD3 Firmware
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
- Results: Battlefield 3 And Far Cry 3
- Results: F1 2012 And Skyrim
- Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Results: Content Creation
- Results: Productivity And File Compression
- Overclocking Results
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Who Wins This Three-Way 990FX Comparison?
Sorry AMD, stick to the APUs for a while until you get some decent R&D budget.