 So today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Gigabyte 890 FXA UD5. And the reason I'm actually unboxing this is I unboxed the 890 FXA UD7 very recently and I was going to use it on my test bench but I didn't realize even at the time I was unboxing it that it's actually one of those boards that's like one slot longer than a normal ATX motherboard. So it didn't even fit on my test bench. So now I need a different motherboard that supports USB 2, USB 3, eSATA and Firewire. So yeah, there's one thing about this motherboard. It has support for seemingly every conceivable external drive interface possible. So let's go over some quick features here. First of all it has their 333 onboard acceleration. That means you got USB 3, USB power 3X and so USB power 3X is a way to deliver 3 times the power through the USB 2 as well as the USB 3 ports. So it means you can power more devices off one port. Very cool. Thank you Gigabyte. We've also got SATA 3 which is 4 times the speed via RAID 0. Oh, okay. That's an interesting way to measure that because it's actually 2 times the speed of SATA 2 but I guess if you RAID 0ed it it would be 4 times the speed. And then we have a 3 year warranty in the US and Canada as well as their new on off charge. So you can see they've got like an iPhone plugged into a USB port. Their USB ports will actually charge certain devices even when the computer is powered off. Pretty sweet. We've also got support for Ultra Durable 3 which is a 2 ounce copper PCB, Japanese solid caps, all that good stuff. We have support for AMD's latest Phenom 2 X6 6 core processors as well as support for auto unlocking. So if you plug in a dual core or a triple core then you will be able to just automatically unlock the extra cores as long as they are stable. We have support for 3-way Frostfire X as well as native support for SATA 3 6 Gigabit per second via the SB850. So that means that unlike the Intel boards out there, AMD's latest chipsets actually support SATA 3 natively. You don't have to plug in any additional third party chipsets to the motherboard. Okay so let's have a look at the accessories that are included. First we've got an I.O. shield and the cameraman is apparently trying to move his wrist rest thing so that he can get closer and look at my I.O. shield. There we go. Then we have a user's manual which has a driver DVD or utility DVD rather. Download the latest off the Gigabyte website, don't bother with that. In here we've got, this is all English and it covers bio settings, installing your drivers, a couple basic troubleshooting things, front panel headers, where to plug stuff into the motherboard. Then you've got like a physical installation guide book so how to install a CPU. This is more like a quick start guide and it's in a bunch of different languages including, wow what is this? Okay leave a comment if you know what language this is. Are you not even focused? There you go. Wow, yeah I've never heard of that. Okay next we've got four SATA ports, four SATA cables and these are two right angle and two straight cables and then one IDE cable. And then a random piece of paper. Nice, doing something in there. That's for sure. Okay here we go. This is at like a weird angle too. I've never seen a motherboard box like this before. Alright oh we've got a Gigabyte powered sticker. So this is powered by Gigabyte or rather your computer will be when you put this motherboard in it. Alright let's get this board open here. Stop rambling. So this board so far actually looks an awful lot like the UD7 that I already had a look at. But I can see right away that there are quite a few things in common. So let's start at the center of the board. We've got an AM3 socket with support for the latest Phantom 2's including X4's, X6, X3's, X2's whatever it is you want to put in there it will be supported as long as it is AM3. So that means that you do have support for dual channel DDR3 memory. Memory controllers in the CPU so AM3 CPUs, DDR3 board, thumbs up, good stuff. Up at the top of the board we've got our 8 pin CPU power connector right where it belongs and that's under sort of the MOSFET cooling which I guess we'll have a closer look at later. As I mentioned before DDR3 dual channel these are color coded so you want to put your dual channel matching DIMMs in the same color slots. Then we have onboard power and reset. This is the perfect place for those in my opinion because I think having them down at the bottom of the board doesn't make any sense because as soon as you load it up with expansion cards you can't access anything down here anyway. This is great. You've got your 24 pin power right where it belongs as well as your floppy and IDE connectors. Next you've got a clear CMOS button and while this isn't quite as good as at the back I O plate it is way better again than having it down at the bottom of the board where you can hardly even access it when it's installed in a case. This is terrific. Okay on the side we've got two SATA 2 ports those are running off a third party chip set which actually I can't tell who makes it because it's labeled Gigabyte SATA 2. And then we have six SATA 3 ports so those are all running off of the ATI SB850 South Bridge. Then we've got system fan. I don't know what these are. TSL1 and TSR1. I'm guessing this is left and right but hmm left and right of what? Impossible to say at this time. Okay we've got another clear CMOS jumper here. That's kind of interesting so you can clear the CMOS the old fashioned way as well. And then we've also got our front panel headers including three USB, one Firewire and one COM. Then we have an LPT. Wow really that's a parallel port header. I haven't seen that on a board in a while. Okay well good on you Gigabyte for including that for the people who still need it. Okay then we've got two PCIe 1x slots, four physical PCIe 16x slots and one PCI slot. Now looking at the electrical connections in these slots these two are going to be 16x, 16x if you're running SLI or cross rather SLI. If you're running Crossfire this board does not support SLI. Only three way Crossfire. And then these two ports are going to run in 8x mode regardless of what you're doing actually you know what? This one's 4x only. So if you're running two Crossfire cards you're going to use this one and cover this slot. And then you're going to use this one and cover this slot for the maximum electrical connectivity speed. And then if you run three cards you add another one here covering the PCI slot and it would run 16x, 16x, 8x. Now since 8x actually doesn't have an impact on performance with modern video cards what I would probably do is I'd try and find a long Crossfire bridge and I'd run it in this one and this one. That way you've got a nice big gap between your cards you leave open a 16x maybe electrical 8x at that point as well as a 4x slot and a 1x slot and then you cover the ancient PCI slot. That's probably what I would do. So here we've got our cooling solution so here's the little cooler on the SB850 South Bridge. You can see that. It's not going to do a whole lot cooling wise but it looks cool and since it doesn't kick off a whole lot of heat anyway it doesn't really matter. It has their kind of Aztec inspired looking North Bridge cooler on here. I really like this. Once again it doesn't have a lot of fins on it. It's not going to do a whole lot of cooling but it totally doesn't matter because the North Bridge again also doesn't kick off a lot of heat. Then we've got our MOSFET cooler. This one does actually do some cooling. It's cooling the A plus two phase power design that is going to be delivering power to up to six cores worth of CPU processing power. And this board unlike the UD7 is actually a normal length. So the UD7 doesn't have a slot here. It skips this slot and then it has seven slots so the board is actually a little bit longer. Go figure. Okay then we're moving on to the back where we will find ports. So there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports, one PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. Then you've got digital audio out in both flavors, optical as well as coaxial. Then you've got two firewire ports and these two are besides being USB 2.0 ports they are also eSATA ports. So the USB 2.0 contacts are on the bottom and the eSATA contacts are up here on the top. Very cool. Then we have USB 3.0, two gigabit ethernet as well as 7.1 audio out. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890FXA UD5.