Just recently, Gigabyte announced its latest gaming hardware product, the GA-990FX-Gaming motherboard. The motherboard is based on AMD’s 990FX chipset which was initially announced on 2011. Interestingly, the GA-990FX-Gaming comes with features that previously were quite rare for AMD motherboards.
The Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming comes with M.2 connectivity – support for next generation SSD cards – which is rare for an AMD-based motherboard. Besides that, the motherboard also went through a revamp in its on-board sound card which includes a Realtek ALC1150 audio codec. In addition to that, the GA-990FX-Gaming has four DDR3 DIMM sockets which supports up to 32 GB of RAM.
Oddly, the GA-990FX-Gaming’s M.2 support is utilising the PCI-e 2.0 lanes instead of PCI-e 3.0 that is currently being adopted by Intel’s Z170 chipset. However, the M.2 will still bring ultra fast speed boost when compared against SATA 3.0 SSDs. To be exact, the M.2 has data transfer speeds of up to 20Gb/s while SATA 3.0 only has speeds up to 6Gb/s. Bare in mind however, at this moment in time, it still remains difficult to fully utilise 6Gb/s of bandwidth.
The GA-990FX-Gaming supports AMD’s AM3+ and AM3 CPUs and has support for both AMD Crossfire as well as Nvidia SLI technologies. This upgrade comes just in time for the imminent release of DirectX 12 which will include the highly anticipated “Multiadapter” feature. Unfortunately, Gigabyte hasn’t announced the release date of the product yet. For more information regarding the motherboard, visit Gigabyte’s website.
(Source: Gigabyte via Overclock3D)
