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MSI’s 990XA-GD55 is one of the cheaper AM3+ motherboards you can buy, coming in at a little under £90. This makes it an appealing option if you want to build a low-cost system with good potential for overclocking, perhaps using one of AMD’s quad-core Bulldozer processors, because these have disabled cores that you can unlock for extra power. The motherboard comes with a traditional BIOS rather than a glossy and easy-to-use UEFI interface, but all the features you need to overclock your processor and memory are there, including a number of handy options for auto-tuning.
The 990XA-GD55 can handle up to 32GB of RAM running at 2,133MHz. Two PCI-E x16 slots provide support for Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFireX multi-graphics card processing, although only one runs at the full x16 speed; the other runs at x8. There are also four PCI-E x1 slots and a PCI slot for older cards. Both the PCI slot and one of the PCI-E x1 slots can be blocked if you install a graphics card with a large cooler in the x16 slots above them. The motherboard has six SATA3 ports, but there aren’t any eSATA ports on the back, nor does the motherboard have any FireWire support.
The back panel does have plenty of USB2 ports, though; there’s eight in total, plus another two USB3 ports. There’s a legacy PS/2 port and 7.1 analogue audio outputs from the Realtek ALC892 audio codec chip. It even has optical and coaxial S/PDIF digital audio outputs.
We were pleased with the 990XA-GD55’s performance in our tests. Sure, it isn’t the best performing AM3 motherboard we’ve seen, but its overall score of 84 doesn’t disappoint, particularly at this relatively low price. The MSI 990FXA-GD65 has the slight edge over it because it has two full-speed PCI-E x16 slots and a full UEFI. The GD65 also performed better in our tests, making it a better buy if your budget stretches an extra £20 or so.
