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Three AMD 990FX-Based Motherboards For Enthusiasts

Three AMD 990FX-Based Motherboards For Enthusiasts
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AMD’s flagship FX-series processors squarely target enthusiasts with sub-£800 system budgets, and it's hard to get there with an expensive motherboard. We requested every vendor's top-value solution, and received three boards for your consideration.

Day in and day out, you and I get hammered with a constant stream of press releases, record-setting attempts, and flowery marketing intended to get us thinking that one company's product is better than another's thanks to a truckload of features. Then we get asked, "How much more would you pay for that?"

Really, though, how many of us can afford a trio of top gaming cards? Who among us wants to configure eight 3 TB disks in RAID 10, and add an SSD boot drive for good measure? How many of us really need all of those features, and how many of us can use all of that performance we find so news-worthy?

AMD’s FX family sits at the opposite end of the price/performance scale from Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E-based Core i7s, yet it still offers the flexibility of 44 PCIe 2.0 lanes. That kind of room to upgrade lends itself to all kinds of low-cost future add-ons that you'll more easily be able to afford, since it didn't cost you an arm and a leg to buy the platform. The extra pathways even let you carry into your new system some of the stuff that made previous-gen builds so enjoyable and versatile, such as TV tuners, wireless networking, and high-end audio cards.

Some folks lament the fact that AMD isn't competing in the high-end space right now. We look at the company's combination of affordable CPUs and connectivity-rich chipsets as ideal for mid-budget builds, though. Marketing folks don't think that sort of talk is very sexy though, so we weren't entirely surprised that only three motherboard vendors expressed interest in sending us 990FX-based products to compare for a 2013 Socket AM3+ update.

990FX Enthusiast Motherboard Features
 ASRock 990FX
Extreme9
Asus M5A99FX
Pro R2.0
Gigabyte
990FXA-UD3
PCB Revision1.041.013.0
ChipsetAMD 990FX / SB950AMD 990FX / SB950AMD 990FX / SB950
Voltage RegulatorFourteen PhasesEight PhasesTen Phases
BIOSP1.10 (01/24/2013)1503 (01/11/2013)FC (02/05/2013)
200.0 MHz RCLK200.83 MHz (+0.42%)200.66 MHz (+0.33%)200.92 MHz (+0.46%)
I/O Panel Connectors
P/S 2221
USB 3.0422
USB 2.0488
Network111
eSATA212
CLR_CMOS ButtonYesNoNo
Digital Audio OutOptical + CoaxialOpticalOptical
Digital Audio InNoneNoneNone
Analog Audio666
VideoNoneNoneNone
Other DevicesIEEE 1394 x1NoneIEEE 1394 x1
Internal Interfaces
PCIe 2.0 x164 (x16/x4/x16/x0 or x16/x4/x8/x8)4 (x16/x4/x16/x4)4 (x16/x4/x16/x4)
PCIe 2.0 x1112
USB 3.02 (4-ports)1 (2-ports)1 (2-ports)
USB 2.02 (4-ports)3 (6-ports)3 (6-ports)
SATA 6Gb/s876
SATA 3Gb/sNoneNoneNone
4-Pin Fan252
3-Pin Fan4None2
FP-Audio111
S/PDIF I/ONoneOutput OnlyOutput Only
Internal ButtonsPower, ResetDirectKey, MemOK, BIOS FlashbackNone
Diagnostics PanelNumericNoneNone
LegacyCIR, IEEE-1394, SerialSerialIEEE-1394, Serial
Mass Storage Controllers
Chipset SATA6 x SATA 6Gb/s5 x SATA 6Gb/s
1 x eSATA 6Gb/s
6 x SATA 6Gb/s
Chipset RAID Modes0, 1, 5, 100, 1, 5, 100, 1, 5, 10
Add-In SATA2 x ASM1061 PCIe
2 x eSATA 6Gb/s
2 x SATA 6Gb/s
ASM1061 PCIe
2 x SATA 6Gb/s
88SE9172 PCIe
2 x eSATA 6Gb/s
USB 3.02 x EJ188H PCIe (8-ports)2 x ASM1042 PCIe (4-ports)2 x EJ168A PCIe (4-ports)
Networking
Primary LANWG82583V PCIeRTL8111E PCIeRTL8111F PCIe
Secondary LANNoneNoneNone
BluetoothNoneNoneNone
Audio
HD Audio CodecALC898ALC992ALC889
DDL/DTS ConnectNot SpecifiedDTS ConnectDDL
WarrantyThree YearsThree YearsThree Years
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  • 1 Hide
    LePhuronn , 3 April 2013 22:32
    And if you put $800 on an Intel system you'd run circles around these things.

    Sorry AMD, stick to the APUs for a while until you get some decent R&D budget.
  • 0 Hide
    eriquen , 11 April 2013 11:59
    I wish to have one of thos mother board in my computer, I do graphic design and I know my rendering could be faster!