3X USB power delivery for greater compatibility and extra power for USB devices. Unique On/Off Charge delivers the best recharging capability to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch Next Generation. Ultra Durable 2 Classic and 4+1 Phase CPU Power design Supports AMD AM3+ & AM3 PhenomII/ AthlonII processors. Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3000 graphics (DirectX10). Innovative Turbo 3D technology to unleash extra levels of 2D/3D graphics performance. PCI-E 2.0 x16 interface for ultimate graphics performance. Hi-def 108dB Signal-to-noise ratio. Blu-ray DVD audio playback. Hybrid EFI technology with DualBIOS for 3TB HDD support. Integrated DVI interface with HDCP support
$ 29.99
Future proofed at a low price,
The product name for this board says AM3 but this board is actually supposed to work with the future AM3+ cpu’s as well. The black socket is proof of that, AM3 boards have white sockets, I was a little disappointed I couldn’t find an AM3+ board in this price range with SATA 6 GB/s ports or USB 3.0 but I don’t think I’m going to be buying an SSD anytime soon making the SATA 6 GB/s next to worthless for me and few electronic devices out there make use of USB 3.0. The heatsink on the north bridge seemed a little loose but that isn’t really a concern. I bought this board to upgrade from a foxconn with the same chipset because it was still using DDR2 ram and I got a hold of some DDR3 ram I wanted to use, I was only looking to spend in this price range for a new board and it was a bonus it’ll support the bulldozer cpu’s.
Apparently the new AM3+ cpu’s will be supported by some of the current AM3 boards with a bios update but the AM3+ motherboards are supposed to have bigger pin holes to support higher power current. The only real differences between the 700 series motherboards and 800 series motherboards are that the integrated graphics are better on the 800 series and they have a SATA III controller and possibly USB 3.0 ports. Unless you’re using a SATA III SSD it doesn’t offer any benefit over SATA II because HDD’s don’t even fully saturate the SATA II connections and HDD’s made for SATA III are backwards compatible. Furthermore, the only differences between the 800 series motherboards and the 900 series motherboards are the 900 series offer SLI support, AMD states they only give official support for 900 series motherboards to be used with AM3+ CPU’s but they also say the previous generation chipsets should work with them as well.
Also, there is a good reason you should buy this motherboard, Gigabyte, over the ASUS AM3+ board being offered for the same price. The ASUS board says it only supports a max TDP on CPU’s of 95 W where as the Gigabyte board lists on their website that it supports CPU’s with a TDP of 125 W giving it a wider range of CPU support.
I was going to dock a star because a dedicated video card makes the PCI-Express slot close to worthless, a dedicated card will block the PCI-Express slot, but decided against it as I don’t even use that slot.
Bottomline: This board worked perfectly out of the box with new RAM that isn’t even listed as being supported by the board, I used the G-skill F3-12800CL7D-4GBXM.
My system is an Athlon II X4 635, 500 GB HDD,a Radeon HD 4650, and 4 GB DDR3-1600 ram clocked at 1333 MHz and my OS is Ubuntu 10.10. After swapping out the motherboard Ubuntu gives me an error on boot that says /dev/null not found but I looked up that error and it seems to be only cosmetic, no real problems.
My next upgrade is going to be to swap out the 4650 for a 5670, will make playing more games feasible.
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|Lots of SATA connectors!,
The best feature of this AM3 motherboard, by far, is the 6 SATA connectors. It’s hard to find reasonably priced motherboards in Micro ATX form factor that have more than 4 of them. It also includes onboard video, making it a great choice for media servers, file servers, and budget builds.
I used this motherboard as part of a low cost media server for my parents, capable of streaming or transcoding 1080p video via PS3 Media Server over a wired connection.
Paired with a triple core AMD Rana 445, a cheap stick of 4GB DDR3 RAM, and a bunch of 2TB WD Green drives, it is working beautifully, on the cheap. The onboard video is a bit weak, but if you are using a front end like a PS3 or other PS3 Media Server compatible DLNA device (including Xbox360), there is absolutely no need for video or audio processing in a media server of this type. Media servers that serve directly from PC -> TV have higher performance requirements, but if serving from PC -> DLNA device -> TV, you can cut audio & video cards out.
Gigabyte has always been a reliable motherboard manufacturer for me, and I have had great luck with their motherboards for both Intel and AMD sockets. Always lots of BIOS features.
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|Excellent benchmarks with AMD 1055T X6,
I benchmarked this motherboard with the Phoronix test suite.
It compared very well with Intel systems. Great mATX board. No problems.
Flawless performance.
Using Ubuntu Linux 11.10. AMD 1055T X6
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