Gigabyte F2A75M-D3H review

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.