Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H seems to be a board that sticks to traditional design. On top of the features from the AMD 890GX + SB850 chipset, the enhancements comes from the inclusion of a NEC USB 3.0 chip for USB 3 devices. On top of that, Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H comes with Ultra Durable3 that is 2oz copper PCB, 50,000 hrs Japanese solid caps and Dual BIOS. It incorporated a 4+1 power phase design for maximum stability. For the energy conscious, it has an Easy Energy Saver feature too. It is EuP Ready as well.

In terms of performance, the Gigabyte outperform the rest of the boards probably due to the slightly higher clock. In addition to that, this board is able to achieve faster performance by tuning up the GPU and Sideport memory. So far, we have managed to get it stable with a sideport memory of DDR3-1580 and that gave the graphics performance a boost.

Easytune 6 is supposed to help in overclocking but we didn't managed to get it run under Windows 7. Instead, we used the BIOS to overclock the Phenom II X3 710 to 13x277 which gives it a speed of 3.6GHz (see screen shot below). Although the board has a pretty complete overclocking bios, the board falls short of power, reset and clear cmos switches.  Overclocking BIOS options can be seen here.

In conclusion, the Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H has an amazing BIOS that overclockers will fall in love with. What it lacks is probably are reset buttons, One key overclocking, DisplayPort support just to name a few. I definitely hope to see it able to unlock the hidden cores one day.

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Pros

• USB 3 support

Cons

• NO Power ON/OFF/Reset Switches, Clear CMOS switch at backplane
• No DisplayPort
• No function to unlock the hidden cores

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.