AMD A4-3400 Review (With GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2)
Closer Look: GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
The box front gives information about their Ultra Durable 4 standard and mentions the use of a new glass fabric PCB twice. Also mentioned is the use of all solid capacitors and and the various AMD related features. While there is still a lot of information on the box it isn't too crowded or ghastly.
Quite small on accessories but at just £40-45 there isnt really much to expect other than the essential items, a couple of SATA cables, driver disc, manual and rear I/O plate.
The board itself is not quite mATX @ 244mm x 244mm but is 225mm x 174mm and is in the contemporary blue on dark blue GIGABYTE colours. Though it only has 2 slots for memory, this motherboard can still take upto 32GB of memory. It is a shame that this size motherboard doesn't recieve more attention. Only a little taller than a mini ITX motherboard with the benefits of having space for 3x PCI slots.
At the top of this board we can see the 4pin CPU power socket and the 3+1 power phases on the left. In the middle we can see the FM1 socket, above this we find the 4pin PWM fan header while below the socket we can find the CMOS battery. Finally on the right we can see the dual channel memory lanes and the 24pin ATX socket.
Moving down to the base of the motherboard we can find the PCIe x16 lane, PCIe x1 and a legacy PCI slot dominating this area. around the outskirts moving left to right we can find the Atheros LAN controller chip, the VIA HD audio chip, Front audio header, another 4pin PWM fan header, COM header, dual BIOS, a pair of USB 2.0 headers each giving another 2x USB ports, the front panel headers and 4x SATA 3Gbps.
The Rear I/O affords 2x PS2 sockets (1x mouse 1x keyboard), D-SUB, DVI-D, 4x USB 2.0, Gigabit lan and 3x audio jacks (Line In/Line Out/Microphone).
GIGABYTE GA-A55M-DS2
The box front gives information about their Ultra Durable 4 standard and mentions the use of a new glass fabric PCB twice. Also mentioned is the use of all solid capacitors and and the various AMD related features. While there is still a lot of information on the box it isn't too crowded or ghastly.
Quite small on accessories but at just £40-45 there isnt really much to expect other than the essential items, a couple of SATA cables, driver disc, manual and rear I/O plate.
The board itself is not quite mATX @ 244mm x 244mm but is 225mm x 174mm and is in the contemporary blue on dark blue GIGABYTE colours. Though it only has 2 slots for memory, this motherboard can still take upto 32GB of memory. It is a shame that this size motherboard doesn't recieve more attention. Only a little taller than a mini ITX motherboard with the benefits of having space for 3x PCI slots.
At the top of this board we can see the 4pin CPU power socket and the 3+1 power phases on the left. In the middle we can see the FM1 socket, above this we find the 4pin PWM fan header while below the socket we can find the CMOS battery. Finally on the right we can see the dual channel memory lanes and the 24pin ATX socket.
Moving down to the base of the motherboard we can find the PCIe x16 lane, PCIe x1 and a legacy PCI slot dominating this area. around the outskirts moving left to right we can find the Atheros LAN controller chip, the VIA HD audio chip, Front audio header, another 4pin PWM fan header, COM header, dual BIOS, a pair of USB 2.0 headers each giving another 2x USB ports, the front panel headers and 4x SATA 3Gbps.
The Rear I/O affords 2x PS2 sockets (1x mouse 1x keyboard), D-SUB, DVI-D, 4x USB 2.0, Gigabit lan and 3x audio jacks (Line In/Line Out/Microphone).
The assembled bundle
