Gigabyte GA-M720-US3 review

Gigabyte’s GA-M720-US3 is a budget AM2+ motherboard, and one of the cheapest we’ve ever seen.

Its looks like the perfect choice for anyone who wants to build a powerful computer on a tight budget. It has an Nvidia nForce 720D chipset, rather than the AMD chipsets used by all the other AMD motherboards here.

There’s a PCI-E x16 slot for your graphics card and plenty of room for other expansion cards, with two PCI-E x1 slots and four PCI slots. Installing a double-height graphics card would block one of the PCI slots, but that leaves four slots free for sound cards, TV tuners and wireless cards. The four memory slots can accept up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM, so there’s plenty for now and the future. It also supports fast 1,200MHz DDR2-9600 RAM. There are six SATA connectors, as well as IDE and floppy connectors.

The back panel provides both six- and four-pin FireWire connectors and eight USB ports. There’s no eSATA port, but there are two PS/2 connectors, so you won’t have to use any USB ports for your keyboard and mouse, leaving plenty for connecting external storage. A Realtek ALC888 sound chip provides onboard audio, with six analogue outputs (7.1 audio) and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF digital audio outputs. There’s no integrated graphics processor, so you’ll need to buy a PCI-E graphics card.

The GA-M720-US3 is easily the best value AM2+ motherboard we’ve seen, with loads of ports, plenty of room for expansion cards and fine performance. It’s our Best Buy.