with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts all right so
this is about as expensive as it gets for a motherboard that's intended for a
platform that's all about the performance of its onboard Graphics the
question then is how can you justify it when motherboards all pretty much
perform the same if you look at purey puu or video card benchmarks well for
one thing it looks better with Gigabyte signature matte black PCB and vibrant
green accent G1 series color scheme and
for another it has more features than most other fm2 plus boards some that on
the Intel motherboard side of things you'd have to spend another 40 bucks on
a G1 sniper z5s if you wanted to get
more on those later though first we'll do what's included in the box and a
physical tour of the board so inside you find an IO shield for cables and a
manual that's it for the board at its
heart we find an fm2 plus socket with support for the latest AMD cavar apus
and last generation fm2 based apus as
well the vrm power delivery and cooling setup around it is fairly mundane but
AMD's latest CPUs aren't the power Hogs
that the old ones were so it's not a concern at all speaking of power the 8
Pin and 24 pin connectors are in their ideal location for easy Cable Management
in most cases and over here we've got four slots for dual Channel DDR3 RAM
with support for up to 2400 MHz RAM and
with support for or XMP memory profiles
the board actually supports up to 64 gigs of RAM with theoretical 16 gig
unbuffered dims front USB 3 is over on
the right hand Edge the year's a self Bridge heat SN down here that covers up
your chipset and you've got SATA 3 ports kind of positioned around it in a
location that I guess is not really ideal but it's not bad either because
all the ones coming straight out of the board are going to be out of the way of a dual slot graphics card in the bottom
slot and next to it you've only got PCI slots most PCI cards aren't that long
we've also got Gigabyte signature dual BIOS down here with two physical chips
so even if you brick it in the middle of a flash you are still good to go and
finally you've got two front usb2 connectors to go along with that front
USB 3 I'd say the PCI slot layout is actually very good it's Crossfire
compatible but not SLI this board is and you can install up to two dual slot
graphics cards with two PCIe 1X slots
and one PCI slot left which is a great mix for what I would call like an
entry-level performance oriented board the fan headers are located here here
here and here I'm a little bit disappointed that we don't have any down
at the bottom of the board but it's your mileage may vary depending on the layout
of your case and now I think we got to get into the sound implementation which
actually takes up most of the space on gigabytes webpage for this board it
features a realtech ALC 898 codec which
is quite similar to the alc889 that Tom's Hardware tested against a $2,000
DAC and found it to perform quite similarly so we can't criticize their
choice of components here they've also included an isolated PCB section which
has become a popular method of reducing electrical interference among motherboard manufacturers and it's also
designed to reduce interference with a gold shield over the audio processor I
haven't seen it demonstrated that these type of shields provide a tangible
benefit but hey it's there looks cool couldn't be bad so there you go stuff
you're more likely to notice in actual use is gigabytes use of nichon pro audio
capacitors they're onboard gain switches that allow you to select either a 2 and
1/2x or 6X amplification mode and their
upgradable opamp socket most people will never use this last feature and it's not
something I really even really recommend messing around with but if you want to
try out different op amps and see how they color the output sound then you've
got that flexibility moving up to the rear iio we find the goldplated 7.1
audio ports please note this doesn't improve audio quality directly but it
can make the ports last longer over time after many insertions and the last audio
Centric feature on the board which isn't directly related to the onboard audio
but may be important for folks using external Dack such as an odac or a file
E10 and that's a special USB 2 connector
right here on the back with gold plating which in in itself doesn't matter at all
but more importantly a separate power source that's designed to minimize power
flu fluctuations fluctuations on the
back we've also got the usual IO so we've got four USB 2.0 ports in addition
to the audio one 2 USB 3.0 ports PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port VGA DVI HDMI
gigabit Ethernet and of course the audio ports that I mentioned before including
optical audio out it should be noted that onboard Graphics is something
special on AMD's latest platform and over its HDMI 1.48 connector with a
cavar Apu installed the board will support 4K output but only at 30 HZ
which is still great if you're looking to set up a media Playback box for your 4K TV and the last interesting point
about the board before we get into our overclocked performance test are the
things that unfortunately I can't validate but what I will say is that if
gigabytes Ultra durable 4 plus design does improve the board's resiliency
against high humidity and electrostatic discharge shocks then that's something
you would want on your board so now without further Ado I'm going to hand
this off to Luke who took this board for a spin to give us an idea of what we can
achieve by overclocking both the CPU and GPU component of a cavar Apu can we
justify a gaming Centric board on this value optimized platform I guess we'll
find out all right guys if we're if we're reviewing a graphics card we
review it overclocked and we recommend that everyone overclocks their graphics card on the way show we talked about
this a lot and everything but we're not that aggressive about it with CPUs and
there's a reason for that but with this what we're overclocking is an APU it is
both graphics and processor in the same thing and we highly suggest overclocking
it and that is why these numbers are going to be overclocked we're running
the system at 4.4 GHz on the processor
side on the graphic side it's running at 900 MHz and we applied 1.52 5 volts to
it to get these numbers I could probably get that voltage number lower just I'm
preparing for the W show right now and don't have a ton of time as you can see
with our star swarm and benchmarks there's a really big Improvement due to
being able to overclock the graphics core that much it's a really big really
big jump over the stock numbers and then in Thief when we're overclocking memory
which is actually completely different you see huge jumps again if you combine
those two it's even more overclocking on this platform is very important if
you're buying a cavar Apu I almost said CPU there if you're buying a cavar Apu
you need to overclock your platform so that was fun guys like and share this
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