- AMD 990FX
- Athlon Series / FX Series / Phenom II
- DDR3 2000(O.C.)/1866/1600/1333/1066
Best Overall 990FX Motherboard of them all
01/29/2016
This review is from: GIGABYTE GA-990FX-Gaming AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
Pros:
Alright, I've been through a lot! Check other if you want to see my experience with 990FX boards. This board is excellent. The BIOS is great, with just the right amount of features and support to make setting up things like UEFI boot or overclocking good, without too much to get confusing. The quality is just downright amazing, especially for this price. I love the PCIe reinforcement, the heatsink, the way each component snapped into place, everything felt like it was top notch. This board has everything you need to keep moving forward and while you sacrifice the backwards compatibility, you do save in dollars.
The FX-9590. Finally, a new board that legitimately supports it! If you just want to drop the chip in the socket, use defaults and play games, this board will do great and you won't get throttled. Check out the cons for thoughts on extra headroom, but this board will do everyday use just fine.
Stability was also great. My system just ran smoothly and I have to say that I don't think I've found a better board that brings the components together the way this one does. My OS booted up great, I had smooth interactions with loading up programs and games worked great as well. This is definitely what I consider the best 990FX board in existence when considering everything together.
Cons:
I might have done a 4.5 egg if I could, but I also think the bug issue will be fixed. I noticed that my LLC was doing the opposite of what it should. At idle, the vcore would raise up, and on a stress test the vcore would drop. This could have been related to a bug involving overclock settings, but it was strange none the less. I'm sure a BIOS update would fix it though and it was pretty easy to just set the Vcore higher and watch it drop to the proper level.
While I do believe this is the best board overall, this is not the best overclocking board. With a bit of direct airflow on the VRM heatsink, you might be able to push the 9590 up a bit, but you might notice some throttling on stability testing because of the heat generated. If you have heavy CPU loads as well, you might need some extra airflow to keep from throttling, but this only applies to the 220w chips and overclocking. Gigabyte easily wins and you still have some decent overclocking room for chips like the 8370. A 6350 would work great.
Overall Review:
I've not only owned multiple 990FX boards, but I've been reviewing hardware for about a year now. The more I progress, the more I try to figure out what's best for situations important to how I like to build. I pumped some pretty heavy amounts of voltage (1.5-1.55 vcore) through each board I own and the Asus Crosshair V Forumula-Z is the only one that doesn't throttle at all. It makes up for that by giving me other headaches that involved hours of research into BIOS settings to get it just right. The Asrock Extreme9 overclocks a bit better than Gigabyte with the VRMs, but both run much smoother. The GA-990FX-Gaming is by far the most advanced and easiest board I've used compared to the two and while MSI's 990FX Gaming board is pretty advanced as well, it can't handle the power delivery nearly as well.
Don't try to run a 220w CPU in boards with less than an 8 phase VRM. I've tried several of these boards because I thought they could handle it, but ran into instability or throttling issues right away. Stock 125w and below will be fine though. My favorite board is easily the Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming. Even though it won't work for all of my testing needs (due to overclocking) it is still the best board I've used. I highly recommend it!
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- Joshua J.
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Verified Owner
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Owned For:
1 week to 1 month
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