AMD 785G Motherboard Roundup --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H

Our last 785G board is also the only AM2+ version. That means while you can install the latest AM3 processor on this board, the Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H works with DDR2 memory and not DDR3. Gigabyte claims that it can support up to DDR2 1200+ when overclocked, but like our experience with the ASUS and ECS, getting it to run at its maximum memory frequency is not child's play.

In our case, the Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H would run our Kingston HyperX DDR2-1066 memory at 800MHz, so your experience may vary with what brand of memory you use. Fortunately, Gigabyte has wisely gone with the SidePort memory option on this board, giving it a potential performance boost that may reduce any advantage that higher clocked DDR3 memory may have over DDR2.

If you have seen Gigabyte's 780G based MA78HM-S2H, then this 785G will be very familiar, as the layout and even the color scheme follows the older 780G version.

Existing users of Gigabyte's 780G motherboards may notice the similarities between this 785G board and their own. One can overlay the older 780G version over this 785G board and they will likely match on many areas. However, one feature that older boards lack is the Ultra Durable 3 technology that now looks to be standard on Gigabyte motherboards. So you'll find 2oz of copper in the PCB (if you can measure it that is) along with a solid capacitor-only design.

Gigabyte did not completely discard the PS/2 connector like the other two vendors but there's only one combo PS/2 port. The other ports however are mostly similar to what we have seen, eSATA, FireWire, HDMI and S/PDIF among the notable ones.

Like ASUS, Gigabyte is not ready to completely ditch the PS/2 port yet, though it is pushing in that direction. The number and type of ports at its rear panel are similar to that on the other two 785G boards, with a single eSATA port that leaves the number of internal SATA ports at five. Like its rivals, expect to find the whole complement of onboard features, from Gigabit Ethernet to HD audio CODEC, FireWire and in the Gigabyte's case, there's also floppy drive support.

A very typical arrangement around the CPU socket, with only solid capacitors accepted.

The sole board to offer floppy drive support, the connector is cramped here along with the other essentials, like power and IDE. There's also a LPT connector. Also, don't forget that unlike the other two, this board uses DDR2.

One of our main issues with the Gigabyte 780G board that we tested (MA78GM-S2H) was in its layout. We encountered a problem where a long, dual-slot graphics card, when installed, will prevent users from fully utilizing their SATA ports. It remains the case for this 785G board, since they both have a similar layout. The same can be said of its heatsink interfering with the PCIe x1 slot. The rest of the board was fine but the SATA ports in particular can be deal-breakers.

One thing that we didn't like from Gigabyte's 780G board was the layout of the SATA ports. Unfortunately, there has been no change here and these ports may interfere with a longer discrete graphics card.

A similarly cramped looking but usable layout for the expansion slots, necessitated no doubt by the limited PCB space.

Gigabyte is another vendor that is not short of proprietary technologies and software to include with its motherboards and some of them, like its BIOS flash utility (Q-Flash) remains one of our favorite. Energy saving technology (Easy Energy Saver) and BIOS corruption protection (DualBIOS) are probably familiar names to most enthusiasts. You can be assured that the full array of these tools is present but we expect consumers to use a couple of these features at most.



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