The 870A UD3

Like I mentioned in the introduction , it doesn't always have to be expensive to get the job done. With this latest release Gigabyte offers an entry board. Retailing at a sub 90 euro price level. Based on AMD's 870 and the proven 850 SB chipset you should have a solid platform for a budget gaming rig. Now extra features as USB3.0 and SATA 6Gbps top it all off at a bargain price.

Let's have a closer look, starting off with some shots of the box(art) :




A brief summary of the 870A UD3 specifications :




The extra inside the box are the very basic, to keep costs at a minimum:



The board in all its glory has one PCIe x16 slot, one x4 and x1 PCIe and 3 more PCI slot providing a decent upgradability path for add on cards.




A beefier setup here in the power department: 8 +2 Phases to feed your CPU. Still a shame there's no heatsink to aid cooling of the little hot headed mosfets. The 870 chipset gets a futuristic shaped heatsink, this heatsink never got warm during testing. On the Dimm slots Gigabyte is still printing the 1866+ on the PCB (We ran into slight problems to obtain that speed).

In total 6 x S-ATA3.0 at your disposal, controlled by the 850SB chipset. The two white 90°C angled are "only" S-ATA2.0

And don’t forget, the board has Dual Bios support, which simply is an excellent feature if you like to tweak your system and want to have a safety net.

The I/O panel at the back explored:





Let’s take a look at the BIOS ->