To be honest, between Z68 this and Sandy Bridge that, we haven’t had much time to check out AMD's latest motherboard offerings. It’s not that we don’t care; it’s just that the fire is burning on the other side of the fence these days. That’s not to say that the 990X chipset in Asus’s midrange M5A99X Evo is a slouch. As a real AM3+ board, it’s guaranteed to work with the upcoming Bulldozer line of CPUs from AMD. On the other hand, plenty of older 890FX boards will also work fine with Bulldozer, so is it even worth your time to check out a 990-series board? In a word: yes. For one thing, these days most 890FX board designs are pretty dated. For example, not all feature USB 3.0 headers. The most exciting change with the 990 series, though, is SLI support. It’s not that we necessarily want to run two Nvidia cards in an AMD board, it’s that we want the freedom to pick our poison. A word to multicard users: The 990X chipset in the M5A99X doesn’t have the PCIe lanes of its performance-oriented 990FX kin. The dual x16 slots run at x8 speeds when running multi-GPUs while 990FX boards let you run two x16 slots at x16 speeds. It’s truly not a deal-breaker for most folks, as the difference in performance is negligible.