If you’re unfortunate enough to have read our previous AMD related reviews, you must surely know by now that one of the major advantages of opting for an AMD Athlon II/Phenom II based machine is it’s attractive ownership costs. This of course is a selling point that is slowly being compromised by Intel’s new “Lynnfield” Core i5/i7 LGA1156 processors, which are currently nipping at AMD’s top end and soon enough there will be official responses to the value for money AMD Athlon II X2 and Phenom II X2 variants as well.
Regardless of this however, the main reason as to how AMD carries this advantage is down to the price of motherboards. Yes, it is also possible to spend as much as £150 on a Socket AM3 motherboard but what we’re trying to imply is that for most situations, even a more modest solution would suffice. “Really?”, You might be enquiring. After all, cheaper motherboards are likely to have weaker power regulation components, will lack important features and more importantly might not overclock as well. While often true, one could not blindly apply this to every circumstance and I can bet and tell you that such an attitude may offer no gains and a wallet that’s a little lighter than it could’ve been. Today we intend on showing you all a motherboard that may just offer the best of both worlds, the Gigabyte MA770T UD3P.
The Gigabyte MA770T UD3P itself sports a fairly conventional motherboard layout, albeit with the narrower ATX style of PCB. As you would expect this motherboard has been built to a lower budget and so features which are arguably unnecessary such as heatpipe coolers, more (physical) PCI-E 16x slots, stacked SATA ports are evidently non existant. On paper however, the cost cutting compromises does not seem to have found it’s way into the build quality department of the motherboard. With an array of exclusively solid capacitors, dual hardware BIOS, 2 ounces of Copper in it’s PCB and an 8+2 Phase power design allowing for full 140W TDP support, technically this motherboard should not be any less able than it’s bigger and more expensive siblings when even operating the range topping Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition. This is all quite hypothetical though so please take a gander at the rest of the review as we put Gigabyte’s budget AM3 solution through it’s paces!
So it goes without saying that the Gigabyte MA770T UD3P ticks all of the boxes that it’s meant to and at a rather palatable pricetag. Until recently the AMD Phenom II held the midrange crown as a midrange platform that could sit somewhere between the Intel Core 2 Quad and the Core i7 in terms of Performance/£ and it’s added perks such as future upgradability prospects combined with lower ownership costs. The introduction of Intel Core i5 has changed the game by offering performance around that of the Phenom II X4 900 series processors and the Intel Core i7 LGA1366 processors but without the excessive motherboard costs. This does not bode well for AMD as it’s Phenom II X4 955 and 965 processors now have much stiffer competition in their price brackets.
So is this motherboard worth considering? Yes, most certainly. As far as Socket AM3 motherboards are concerned, this is arguably the sweetspot in terms of features relative to price. It’s debateable as to whether the Intel Core i5 750 and a base spec Intel P55 motherboard is worth it’s slightly higher ownership costs.