Gigabyte F2A75M-D3H review

The Gigabyte F2A75M-D3H is a socket FM2 motherboard compatible with AMD’s latest A-series “Trinity” processors such as the Best Buy-winning AMD A10-5800K. It uses the mid-range A75 chipset to deliver six SATA3 ports, six back-panel USB ports (two of which are USB3) and four RAM slots that can take up to 64GB of RAM. That isn’t bad for a budget motherboard, especially a MicroATX motherboard.

The F2A75M-D3H also has VGA, DVI-D and HDMI graphics outputs, three analogue audio outputs, an optical S/PDIF output, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a single PS2 connector on the back panel. You can add even more I/O to your PC with the F2A75M-D3H’s internal headers. You get a single USB3 header that provides you with up to two more USB3 ports, two USB2 headers that provide you with up to four more USB2 ports and legacy parallel and serial port headers.

The internal I/O is welcome, but it’s what we expect to see on an A75 motherboard and isn’t particularly exciting. The back-panel I/O is similarly typical, but the flexible choice of graphics outputs means it has a connection to suit any consumer display. The motherboard even supports triple-monitor setups, which is handy if you always have lots of programs open on the desktop and don’t want to keep cycling through them.

When combined with an AMD A10-5800K and 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, the F2A75M-D3H scored 65 overall in our multimedia benchmark tests. This is what we expect to see, and is the same score achieved by the cheaper MSI FM2-A75MA-E35. AMD’s A-series CPUs provide excellent graphics performance, thanks to their powerful built-in GPUs, so it was no surprise that the F2A75M-D3H scored 43fps in our Dirt Showdown benchmark at 720p with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics options set to High. That frame rate’s plenty smooth enough to enjoy Dirt Showdown, which makes the F2A75M-D3H a decent board if you want to build a cheap media PC that can also play some modern games. Of course, you could always improve graphics performance by planting a graphics card into its PCI-E x16 slot.

We attempted to improve the scores by overclocking the motherboard using the F2A75M-D3H’s UEFI BIOS, which looks dated compared to that used by some other boards, such as the MSI FM2-A75MA-E35. It’s also very unresponsive, with multiple clicks necessary to alter an option; sometimes we had to use the keyboard to alter settings.

The overclocking options are pretty comprehensive. You can adjust the frequency of the front-side bus, the chipset, the CPU and the RAM, but the BIOS’s poor interface makes this a more laborious task than it needs to be. You can also adjust the voltages of the CPU and RAM and chipset. We overclocked the CPU and RAM of our test setup to 4.2GHz and 1866MHz respectively, and scored 68 overall in our re-run multimedia benchmarks. Even with such a conservative overclock applied, the system certainly felt quicker and more responsive.

As this is a Micro ATX motherboard, there isn’t that much room for expansion. The six SATA3 ports mean you don’t have to shuffle your cables around when you buy a newer, faster drive, but the F2A75M-D3H only has one PCI-E x16 slot, one PCI-E x16 slot running at x4, a PCI-E x1 slot and a legacy PCI slot. Again, this is typical arrangement for a Micro ATX motherboard, but its small form factor means you’ll lose the single PCI-E x1 slot if you install a dual-slot graphics card. The legacy PCI slot is handy if you have you’re bringing I/O cards across from your old PC, but we’d rather lose that and have an extra x1 slot so that we could install a USB3 slot.

The Gigabyte F2A75M-D3H is a decent board around which to build a Trinity-based media or small form-factor PC, but enthusiasts would be better off either paying more for the Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 or slightly less for the MSI FM2-A75MA-E35.