Gigabyte sticks with their usual, very informative, styling for the 890GX board. Inside is a reasonably standard bundle which includes all the items required to get a system up and running, as well as a well written manual.
As with the packaging Gigabyte stick with a familiar design for the 890GPA-UD3H by using a blue and white colour scheme on this board. As this model is part of the Ultra Durable 3 series we have the usual excellent build quality which includes two 2oz copper layers in the PCB, Japanese Solid Capacitors and Dual BIOS to protect us from BIOS corruption.
Up at the top of the board is the AM3 socket which can hold any of AMD’s Phenom 2 range and alongside this are the four dual channel DDR3 slots. Gigabyte are keen to advertise that these allow overclocking to over 1866MHz and as with most recent boards each slot allows installation of up to 4GB.
Down at the bottom left of the board are the add-in card slots which run from PCIe 1x, through PCIe 16x, 2x PCIe 1x, PCIe 16x to 2xPCI. Like the other boards in this test the two larger slots run in 8x mode when CrossFire capable cards are installed.
At the bottom right of the PCB we find the dual BIOS chips as well as six SATA 6GB/s connectors which can run in ACHI or RAID mode. Also present here are two SATA 3GB/s ports which are ideal for attaching lower speed devices such as optical drives which do not benefit from the enhanced speeds of SATA 6GB/s.
Connectivity on the 890GPA-UD3H is very good, offering us 4x USB 2.0, PS/2, optical out, Firewire, GB LAN, audio in/out, DVI, HDMI, VGA and 2x USB 3.0 which use the NEC controller.
Gigabyte BIOS
Gigabyte use Award BIOS on this board and after pressing CTRL+F1 to unlock all of the BIOS functionality we can configure the board to the finest detail using the MB Intelligent Tweaker screen. GPU overclocking is present on this model and as with other Gigabyte boards Q-Flash makes an appearance, allowing us to update the BIOS quickly and easily from a USB drive.
