Stefan Mileschin

GIGABYTE created UEFI-equipped revisions of most of its socket AM3+ motherboards with the advent of FX "Vishera" processors last year, but held back with its flagship motherboard for the platform, the 990FXA-UD7. The company released an updated revision of the motherboard, dubbed 990FXA-UD7 Rev 3.0, completely skipping "Rev 2.0." While the new board is essentially laid out similar to its predecessor, a lot has changed.

To begin with, its based on GIGABYTE's newer (though not latest) Ultra Durable 4 construction. A 10-phase high-amperage VRM powers the AM3+ socket, which appears to be ready for AMD's FX-9000 series CPUs for overclockers. The CPU VRM uses driver-MOSFETs, although not quite the PowIRStage chippery we find on Ultra Durable 5 motherboards. A thicker, chunkier heatsink is used to cool these driver-MOSFETs and the AMD 990FX northbridge. This cluster of heatsinks is connected to the one that cools the AMD SB950 southbridge over a heat pipe. The AM3+ socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, which support up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR3-2000+ MHz memory.

http://www.techpowerup.com/186340/gi...ature-set.html