To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
If you’re looking to build an AM3+ system, Gigabyte’s 970A-DS3 could be the ATX motherboard for you. It’s compatible with AMD’s AM3+ FX processors as well as AM3 Phenom II and Athlon II models and uses the AMD 970 north bridge chipset and AMD SB950 south bridge chipset.
Measuring 225x305mm, there’s plenty of room for expansion, as the 970A-DS3 comes with two PCI-E x16 slots. The first slot runs at the full x16 speed, so it should be the first choice for a single graphics card installation; the second slot runs at x4 speed. This is only likely to cause a bottleneck if you run dual high-end graphics cards in CrossFireX mode. In addition there are three PCI-E x1 slots and PCI slots.
You’ll need to install at least one graphics card, as the 970A-DS3 has no display outputs. A lot of PC users will do this anyway as most processors’ on-chip graphics aren’t good enough to run games or watch 4K video footage, for example, but it does mean you’ll have to factor in the extra cost of a graphics card if you don’t have one already.
Instead, all you get on the rear panel are six USB2 and two USB3 ports, two PS/2 ports for older mice and keyboards, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm audio jacks. Bear in mind that it doesn’t have any USB3 headers for adding more USB3 ports at the front of your PC, so you’ll have to make do with its three USB2 headers if you need more ports, or install a USB3 card.
The rest of the board was more promising. Its four DDR3 memory slots can hold up to 32GB of RAM and can take modules with default speeds of up to 1,866MHz, but it will also support a maximum speed of 2,000MHz when overclocked. With six SATA3 ports at its disposal, all your drives will be able to perform at the best speeds possible as well, so you won’t have to worry about switching them round to get the best performance.
We tested the 970A-DS3 with an AMD FX-8350 processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1,600MHz. It scored 86 overall, which is three points slower than what we’d normally expect to see from this processor, but at least the board’s BIOS is easy to use if you want to overclock your system to increase its performance.
The Gigabyte 970A-DS3P isn’t perfect, but this is still a decent AM3+ board. It doesn’t have many ports or display outputs, but its greater number of SATA 3 ports and expansion slots mean it’s a great choice for most people.
