Gadgetory

with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts 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 pure CPU or video card benchmarks well for one thing it looks better with gigabytes 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 snipers and 5s 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 i/o shield for SATA cables and a manual that's it for the board at its heart we find an FM 2 plus socket with support for the latest AMD Kaveri ap use and last generation FM 2 based ap use 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 locations 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 24 hundred megahertz Ram and with support for a MP or XMP memory profiles the board actually supports up to 64 gigs of ram with theoretical 16 gig on buffered dims front USB 3 is over on the right-hand edge the years of Southbridge heat sink 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 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 USB two connectors to go along with that front USB three 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'd 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've got to get into the sound implementation which actually takes up most of the space on gigabytes web page for this board it features a real tech alc 898 codec which is quite similar to the alc889a at Tom's Hardware tested against the $2000 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 and on 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 look school can be bad so there you go stuff you're more likely to notice in actual use as gigabytes use of NIT chacón Pro Audio capacitors their on-board gain switches that allow you to select either a two and a half X or six X amplification mode and they're upgradeable op-amp 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 i/o we find the gold-plated 7.1 audio ports please note this doesn't improve audio quality directly but it can make the port's 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 DAC such as an ode ACK or a file e 10 and that's a special USB - connector right here on the back with gold plating which in itself doesn't matter at all but more importantly a separate power source that's designed to minimize power fluctuate 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 two USB 3.0 ports ps2 keyboard mouse combo port VGA DVI HDMI Gigabit Ethernet and of course the audio ports as I mentioned before including optical audio out it should be noted that onboard graphics is something special on AMD's latest platform and over at HDMI 1.4 a connector with the Kaveri APU installed the board will support 4k output but only at 30 Hertz 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 + design does improve the board's resiliency against high humidity and electrostatic discharge shots 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 what we can achieve by overclocking both the CPU and GPU component of a Kaveri apu can we justify a gaming centric board on this value optimized platform I guess we'll find out alright guys if we're if we're reviewing a graphics card we review it overclocked and we recommend that everyone overclocks our graphics card on the way and shall 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 gigahertz on the processor side on the graphics side it's running at 900 megahertz and we applied 1.5 to 5 volts to it to get these numbers I could probably get that voltage number lower just I'm preparing for the wine show right now and don't have a ton of time as you can see with our star swarm benchmarks there's a really big improvement due to being able to overclock the graphics court that much it's a really big really big jump over the stock numbers and then in theif when we're overclocking memory which is actually completely different you see huge dumps again if you combine those two it's even more overclocking on this platform is very important you're buying a Kaveri APU almost at CPU there if you're buying a Kaveri APU you need to overclock your platform so that was fun guys like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment on the Linus tech tips forum linked in the video description if you want to discuss this product you want to know the pricing of this product or you have any constructive criticism for me and my team also linked in the video description is our support link of options to buy cool t-shirts like this one give us a monthly contribution or give us a kickback whenever you buy random junk on Amazon check it out if you enjoy our videos it helps us out a whole bunch and as always guys thank you for watching and don't forget to subscribe