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 78LMT-USB3 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £40
inc VAT

This budget AM3+ motherboard doesn’t have SATA3 or many expansion slots, but USB3 support is good to see

Specifications

AM3+, microATX, AMD 760G chipset, supports: Athlon II, Phenom II, 760G

http://www.kikatek.co.uk

The 78LMT-USB3 is one of Gigabyte’s budget AM3+ motherboard that uses AMD’s low-end 760G chipset and supports its FX, Phenom II and Athlon II processors. This chipset lies at the complete opposite end of the spectrum compared to AMD’s top range 990FX chipsets and, as such, has fewer features.

Gigabyte 78LMT-USB3

The biggest omission here is its lack of SATA3 support. Instead, you have six SATA2 ports, which means that the motherboard will support plenty of storage, but the downside is your disks won’t be as fast. For mechanical hard disks this isn’t too much of a problem, as they struggle to use SATA3 speeds, but it’s very limiting for SSDs, which require the faster SATA standard to get the most out of them.

Although fast internal storage may be out of the question, the motherboard at least supports super-fast external storage thanks to its titular USB3 support. This is a fairly rare sight on budget motherboards, but the 78LMT-USB3 has two USB3 ports on the rear and one USB3 header. It also has four USB ports and two USB headers, along with a Gigabit Ethernet port, a legacy PS/2 port and three 3.5mm audio outputs on the back panel.

Gigabyte 78LMT-USB3

This motherboard is one of the few that has integrated onboard graphics thanks to its Radeon HD 3000 GPU. It will struggle to play games, although it’s fine for general desktop use. With VGA, DVI-D and HDMI graphics outputs, you can use a wide-variety of monitors, which is good to see.

Despite measuring the standard 244x244mm for a micro-ATX board, it doesn’t have much room for expansion. There’s one PCI-E x16 slot for an external graphics card, but this will obscure its single PCI-E x1 slot, leaving you with just one other legacy PCI slot.

It’s good to see four DDR3 DIMM memory slots that support up to a maximum of 32GB of RAM. This is more than plenty for anyone. We’re pleased to say that this old chipset still provided decent performance in our benchmarks. Our AMD FX-8350 processor and 4GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM scored 89 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. This is in-line with what we expect from this kind of processor.

Gigabyte 78LMT-USB3

One word of caution: the latest processor support was only introduced with BIOS version F3, so you may have to perform an update to get support for your chosen model. This will require a supported processor to do. Gigabyte’s website has a full list of supported processors and the required BIOS version.

There’s no UEFI, and an old-fashioned Award BIOS instead. It’s a little clunky when you’re used to the new system, but perfectly functional and provides access to overclocking settings if you want to squeeze a bit more performance out of your components.

Its two USB3 ports makes the 78LMT-USB3 a great buy if you’re not too fussed about its lack of SATA3 support. At this price it’s hard to argue, but if you want to use an SSD now or in the future, we recommend spending a bit more money to get a SATA3-equipped motherboard.

Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor socket AM3+
Form factor microATX
Size 244x244mm
Processor support Athlon II, Phenom II, 760G
Processor external bus 100MHz (HyperTransport)
Chipset north bridge AMD 760G
Chipset south bridge AMD SB710
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics Yes
Supported memory type DDR3
Maximum memory speed PC3-12800
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 32GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £40
Supplier http://www.kikatek.co.uk
Details www.giga-byte.com

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 1
Fan headers 3
Floppy ports 0
IDE ports 1
Serial ATA ports 6
RAID chipset (max disks) AMD SB710 (RAID 0, 1, 10, JBOD)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC887 (3x analogue out)
USB2 ports / headers 6/3
Firewire ports / headers 0/0
Legacy ports PS/2
Other ports 2x USB3, VGA, DVI, HDMI
Cables included 2x SATA, 1x IDE
Brackets included none
Software included Norton Internet Secutiry (OEM)

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 7,000MHz

Read more

Reviews