Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Revision 3.0 Stay Away!

[Hellsrage]

Well, after a while on an owners thread on another tech forum I have come to the conclusion that I cannot recommend this board to anyone looking for a stable motherboard.

 

For a while now many of us who own this board, most of us running an AMD FX-83xx have been getting very bad voltage throttling when the CPU is at full load (Overclocked and at stock), originally this was thought to be because of the absolute garbage BIOS it has but one member disagreed and went on testing his own theory. After a little tinkering he discovered the root of the problem was either crappy VRMs or the crappy VRM heat sink that comes on the board. He ended up buying an aftermarket heat sink and mounting it on his board, that alone still didn't solve the problem but he then put a fan directly on top of it to cool it and the board was now stable. No voltage throttling when the CPU is at load.

 

A pic of his current set up.

 

After his discovery another member tried doing what he did with success. So we went and sent reports to Gigabytes tech support, here are some of replies we got.

 

On top of the bad quality board the BIOS is just as bad, it's missing a lot of controls and most of the settings are done by offsets. This includes voltage which is just absolutely ridiculous. 

 

In short the VRMs start to cause throttling when they get to a certain temp, problem is they get to that temp very very easy and require a fan to be placed on top of the heat sink just to acquire stability. This seems to only be present with 8 core AMD CPUs.

 

So if you were thinking of picking up this revision board (revision 3.0 but this problem may be on all other revisions of UD3 as well) you may want to think twice and pick another board like many of us now wish we could. I personally will be saving up to buy a board from a different manufacture.

 

 

[TyagoDani]

EA related??? lol

[Hellsrage]

EA related??? lol

What?

[Lavi]

Do you have a link to the original threads? I'd like to read a bit more about this before I warn others.

[Hellsrage]

Do you have a link to the original threads? I'd like to read a bit more about this before I warn others.

Here ya go. http://www.overclock.net/t/1023100/official-gigabyte-ga-990fxa-series-owners-thread-club/5300

 

We have been talking about this for about the last 50+ pages.

[TyagoDani]

What?

just kidding. if you have watched the last 3 or so live streams you would understand

[Hellsrage]

just kidding. if you have watched the last 3 or so live streams you would understand

Ah, I have missed the last few streams :unsure: and watching them on YouTube just isn't the same. lol

 

Although when I told my friend about the problems with this board this what he said "EA of motherboards much" :lol:.

[Richyo]

I have a 990FXA-D3 with a Phenom 955 and the volatage jumps between 1.408 and 1.428v constantly. Would this be considered throttling? 

[killerx525]

I have a 990FXA-D3 with a Phenom 955 and the volatage jumps between 1.408 and 1.428v constantly. Would this be considered throttling? 

No, i believe it would be vdroop.

[Hellsrage]

I have a 990FXA-D3 with a Phenom 955 and the volatage jumps between 1.408 and 1.428v constantly. Would this be considered throttling? 

What do you have your LLC set to?

 

No, i believe it would be vdroop.

You would be correct.

[ercineker]

i have the rev1.1 mobo and the cpu speed drops to 3.5 ghz (4ghz fx8350) on prime95 after a minute or so...

[Hellsrage]

i have the rev1.1 mobo and the cpu speed drops to 3.5 ghz (4ghz fx8350) on prime95 after a minute or so...

 

Yeah the problem seems to be on all UD3 boards, Gigabyte did a terrible job with this board and it has changed a lot of people opinions on their products I for one will probably forgo buying another board from them in the future they don't seem to know what they are doing.

 

We have just recently figured out that no one knows what the sensors on this board are reading, and some peoples sensors don't read properly to begin with one thing is for sure though Gigabyte has no clue what the sensors they put on the board are reading the response we got from their forum was all wrong because the temp sensor they said was reading Northbridge was just replicating the CPU temp.

[ercineker]

Yeah the problem seems to be on all UD3 boards, Gigabyte did a terrible job with this board and it has changed a lot of people opinions on their products I for one will probably forgo buying another board from them in the future they don't seem to know what they are doing.

 

looks like rev1.1 isnt that bad... i reversed the rear 140mm fan as intake and cpu is at 4ghz most the time and turbos to 4.1 sometimes...

[That Norwegian Guy]

lol I was actually thinking of getting this motherboard but decided to get Asus Sabertooth Gen 3 when I heard that this board has a broken RAID controller (raid 5 is borked) I guess it had even more hidden issues than I thought.

[Mystikalrush]

I have the rev 1.0 of this board and never ran into this issue with the 8150, besides the typical vdroop doing its thing. Sad to see quality parts, not so worth it for the red team. Now this board sits high in the closet all alone. :P

[xForbiddenOne]

Huh, This was actually an incredible bit of information, I was so intrigued I read onwards from the point of where your link starts. I'm glad people are actually pushing for something to be done about it, But saddened that Gigabyte is just doing a work around of it. I'll be honest, I absolutely love my z77-UD4H, And I've found the PCB to be thicker than that of the Asus boards I've used, Which I personally like, But that made me think a little more on whether I should support them or not. Even if most of their boards are fine, Some of their responses were just plain bad, And it didn't sound like Gigabyte read/or acknowledged the actual problem at hand. And now I know not to recommend this specific board!  :blink:

[Hellsrage]

Unfortunately things have gotten worse with their support, I was told to call a number for RMA and they guy who answered told me to go to their site for RMAs. He was also pretty unprofessional he answered with just a "Hello?" leaving me to wonder if I had been redirected properly. I have given up on there support if you can even call it that and I don't think I'm even going to bother with an RMA since the only hope I have is if they give me a UD5 which doesn't suffer from these issues.

[Hellsrage]

Well, I have some images of the warping people are having, I myself have a very slight warp where the VRMs are but I fear if remove it from the case it may warp just as bad as theirs.

 

As you can see the heat coming from the VRMs is significant.

 

I also posted to their Facebook page in the hopes I might get a response of actual use but they hid my comment shortly after. I just posted another one though and I'll continue to bother them till these issues are addressed.

[Hellsrage]

Even though Gigabyte wouldn't admit the problems that owners like myself suffer with on the GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev. 3, it appears they have gone and fixed the problems in yet ANOTHER revision. 

 

GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4: http://www.techpowerup.com/186972/gigabyte-rolls-out-990fxa-ud3-rev-4.html

 

Now the question is can I get Gigabyte to send me one so that I can have a fully functional motherboard.

[Hellsrage]

Nope. I was given the same number as above to call but this time I managed to get my question in and he said they don't give revision swaps. So anyone who has a UD3 Rev. 3 with throttling issues is own their own.

 

The only positive to all of this is that hopefully future people who get sucked into the 990FXA-UD3 get the Rev. 4 board which once again hopefully doesn't have the same issues that plague the Rev. 3 owners and I guess I learned to ignore Gigabyte products for a while. 

 

I'll leave you with a little gem from their RMA department given to miklkit over on OCN in the GA-990FXA series owners thread.

 

 

I got a reply from Gigabyte about my UD3 RMA! They said that they can not find anything wrong with the hard drive controller. The only issues I had with hard drives was that it would not recognize them until they had been formatted.

 

I RMA'd it because of overheating and a bad bios that caused more overheating. 

 

So it looks like I will be getting the same warped board back. $220 flushed down the toilet...........

 

 

[mickman14]

I can confirm that the fan focused on the VRM heatsink helps with stability. I've managed to get a further 0.2GHz out of my 8350 using this technique

[Cryptonite]

 

Well, after a while on an owners thread on another tech forum I have come to the conclusion that I cannot recommend this board to anyone looking for a stable motherboard.

 

For a while now many of us who own this board, most of us running an AMD FX-83xx have been getting very bad voltage throttling when the CPU is at full load (Overclocked and at stock), originally this was thought to be because of the absolute garbage BIOS it has but one member disagreed and went on testing his own theory. After a little tinkering he discovered the root of the problem was either crappy VRMs or the crappy VRM heat sink that comes on the board. He ended up buying an aftermarket heat sink and mounting it on his board, that alone still didn't solve the problem but he then put a fan directly on top of it to cool it and the board was now stable. No voltage throttling when the CPU is at load.

 

A pic of his current set up.

 

After his discovery another member tried doing what he did with success. So we went and sent reports to Gigabytes tech support, here are some of replies we got.

 

On top of the bad quality board the BIOS is just as bad, it's missing a lot of controls and most of the settings are done by offsets. This includes voltage which is just absolutely ridiculous. 

 

In short the VRMs start to cause throttling when they get to a certain temp, problem is they get to that temp very very easy and require a fan to be placed on top of the heat sink just to acquire stability. This seems to only be present with 8 core AMD CPUs.

 

So if you were thinking of picking up this revision board (revision 3.0 but this problem may be on all other revisions of UD3 as well) you may want to think twice and pick another board like many of us now wish we could. I personally will be saving up to buy a board from a different manufacture.

 

Now add the temperatures of South Africa and you'll know why gigabyte, like asus isn't on my list of to buy components, running at clock speeds with these brands are ok but as soon as you try overclocking you're gonna have a bad time.

 

MSI is the only one of the 3 "big name" brands that I would suggest to anyone.

[Hellsrage]

I can confirm that the fan focused on the VRM heatsink helps with stability. I've managed to get a further 0.2GHz out of my 8350 using this technique

It does indeed, after mounting the fan that comes stock with the FX-8350 over the VRM heat sink and using SpeedFan to control the speed so it's not so loud, I am now at 4.5GHz stable.

 

Now add the temperatures of South Africa and you'll know why gigabyte, like asus isn't on my list of to buy components, running at clock speeds with these brands are ok but as soon as you try overclocking you're gonna have a bad time.

 

MSI is the only one of the 3 "big name" brands that I would suggest to anyone.

 

I'll be purchasing the Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z as soon as I have the money. 

 

 

 

Well, today one of the long time users of the fantastic GA-990FXA-UD3 R3 made a post about why this board is just amazing. /Sarcasm.

 

"I love my UD3... I decided to try my luck with hybrid physx put an old 8800GTS in the last PCIE slot. Well the performance was terrible so I decided that I didn't need it after all so when I pulled the GTS out it brought the whole slot connector with it! Yes the lock was undone. Now I'm scared to remove the 7970 from the main slot lol" -OzzyRuleZ

[Jumper118]

ud7 looks very nice and with amd boards being so much cheaper you might as well get one. for a 8 core i would be looking at a ud5/gd65 to get a decent oc. 

[Hellsrage]

ud7 looks very nice and with amd boards being so much cheaper you might as well get one. for a 8 core i would be looking at a ud5/gd65 to get a decent oc. 

 

No go for me, I'm done with Gigabyte till they straighten up on stuff. Their AMD motherboards aren't that great when it comes to quality control, their BIOS support is abysmal and so is their " tech support".