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’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.
