To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £69
inc VAT

This microATX board is a superb choice for AM3 on a budget.

Specifications

AM3, microATX, AMD 785G chipset, supports: Athlon II, Phenom II

http://www.overclock.co.uk

Gigabyte’s GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is the cheapest AM3 motherboard we’ve reviewed, and one of the first to use AMD’s new 785GX Northbridge and SB710 Southbridge.

These aren’t designed to rival high-performance 790-based boards, but to provide an inexpensive way of building an AM3 system.

There’s plenty crammed on to this microATX motherboard, with four memory slots supporting 16GB of RAM, five SATA ports and the usual IDE and floppy connectors. There are two PCI slots and one PCI-E x1 slot, although the latter is placed up against the Northbridge heatsink. Fortunately, this didn’t stop us installing any of our test cards.

On the back, there’s room for just four USB ports and a single PS/2 port, but there are both FireWire and eSATA ports. The graphics processor, an ATI Radeon HD 4400, is the most powerful onboard GPU ATI has released to date. Sadly, our Call of Duty 4 test consistently crashed halfway through, probably due to unstable pre-release drivers.

If you want the most future-proof AMD motherboard possible, it makes sense to buy one with an AM3 socket. The GA-MA785GMT-UD2H doesn’t have the performance of high-end AM3 motherboards such as Asus’s M4A79T Deluxe, but it costs around half as much. Combine it with an Athlon II X2 240 processor and you have the basis of an AM3 system for under £120.

Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor socket AM3
Form factor microATX
Size 243x243mm
Processor support Athlon II, Phenom II
Processor external bus 200MHz (2GHz HyperTransport)
Chipset north bridge AMD 785G
Chipset south bridge AMD SB710
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics Yes
Supported memory type DDR3 1066/1333/1666
Maximum memory speed PC3-10600
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 16GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £69
Supplier http://www.overclock.co.uk
Details www.gigabyte.eu

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 1
Dual graphics architecture none
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 1
PCI slots 2
Fan headers 2
Floppy ports 1
IDE ports 1
Serial ATA ports 5
RAID chipset (max disks) AMD SB710 (RAID 0, 1, 10, JBOD)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC889A (6x analogue out, HDMI, optical S/PDIF)
USB2 ports / headers 4/4
Firewire ports / headers 1/1
Legacy ports 1x PS/2, parallel header, serial header
Other ports eSATA, HDMI, DVI, D-Sub
Cables included 2x SATA, 1x IDE
Brackets included none
Software included none

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 500MHz

Read more

Reviews | PCs