Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H review

Despite being a compact microATX board, Gigabyte’s 880GMA-UD2H packs in plenty of features. As well as USB3 and SATA III, it has two PCI-E x16 slots, but they’re so close together that inserting a dual-height graphics card in one will prevent you from putting anything in the other. There’s also a PCI-E x1 slot and a PCI slot.

Typically for a microATX board, everything’s a little cramped, so you’ll need to take care and plan your build carefully. There are five SATA III connectors and an IDE connector for PATA hard disks.

At the back there are two USB3 ports and four USB ports – up to six more USB ports on brackets or front panel connectors can be added via three onboard headers. There’s also an eSATA port and a FireWire port, along with an internal FireWire header. A PS/2 port means that you don’t have to connect both mouse and keyboard to one of your precious USB ports. The onboard ATI Radeon HD 4250 graphics processor has DVI, VGA and HDMI outputs, while the Realtek audio processor can output 7.1 surround sound from six analogue stereo ports or an optical S/PDIF output.

A score of 102 in our benchmark tests is about what we’d expect from an AM3 board. At £76, the 880GMA-UD2H isn’t as much of a bargain as Asus’s M4A785D-M Pro, which performed a little better in our tests and costs £20 less, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find an AM3 motherboard with SATA III and USB3 for less. However, unless you’re building a compact system, the extra upgradability of the Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 ATX board wins it by a hair.