Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H review

Gigabyte’s MA78GPM-DS2H is the only AMD microATX board here. Because of the dimensions it has a fiddly layout.

The motherboard has five SATA connections and an eSATA port, along with four USB ports, FireWire and a full complement of video outputs. It also has an AMD 780G Northbridge, a 700SB Southbridge and an onboard ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics processor (capable of Blu-ray playback) with an HDMI output, which is useful if you’re building a media centre PC.

Like all AM2+ motherboards, the MA78GPM-DS2H supports Phenom II, but its performance doesn’t appear to be optimised for this processor. Our tests produced some surprising results. We’ve listed its performance with an AMD Phenom II 940, but the results we obtained were lower than when we fitted a less-powerful Phenom X4 9950. For example, its overall PCMark Vantage score was 4,441 with the Phenom II, but it achieved a score of 4,792 with the older processor. A future firmware upgrade may correct this but none was available at the time of testing.

With the minor irritations such as the lack of support for the very latest processors, Gigabyte’s MA78GPM-DS2H didn’t get off to a good start. However, its performance is fine with older processors, which is all you need if you want to build a compact media centre PC using a microATX motherboard and a case such as Antec’s Minuet 350. The graphics card’s ability to play Blu-ray movies means it’s good value, too.