The GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 AMD 900 series motherboard was designed from the ground up to be a stable, high-speed platform for AMD Socket AM3+ processors. We test out this AMD 990FX mainboard by using the recently released AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer 8-core processor on it to see how it performs and overclocks. Read on to see how this $209.99 motherboard does in all of the tests we throw at it.

One aspect of the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 truly set it apart from the ASUS Crosshair V Formula. That was our experience when we overclocked the AMD FX-8150. When we pushed the FX-8150 on the ASUS Crosshair V Formula, we weren't able to break 4.6GHz with all eight cores active. At 4.6GHz the system would boot up completely normal and seemed to be rock solid. When we tried for 4.7GHz the system wouldn't even post, didn't seem to matter if we pushed more voltage or any of the other tricks up our sleeves. It seemed that our FX-8150 was just limited to 4.6GHz with all eight cores. We were able to disable four of the cores and get to 4.9GHz. The GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 turned out to be a completely different story. We were able to bring the system to 4.6GHz, and didn't plan on much more thinking that our chip wouldn't do any more. Turns out it wasn't the chip that was the issue...