The best analogy of how a computer system works is the human body. It provides inspiration to the design of all machines and today’s modern PCs are no different. If the power supply unit is the heart of your computer, then the nervous system of a computer is the motherboard. Earlier on, we took an in depth look at AMD’s APUs (A8-3850/A6-3650) and the new Llano platform. Today, we are going to give you a closer look at the options for the “nervous system” we spoke of: The GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H. But is it the right nervous system for your AMD Fusion based PC? Let’s find out!
Features and Specifications
Upon first glance of the features, the first thing I noticed was that the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H included one of each display option. It had HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI-D, and VGA. The VGA (D-sub) is actually linked to the A75 Hudson FCH through a “DP” link. This is because the output of the APU 0n-die northbridge is digital and the A75 Hudson FCH has a DAC (digital to analog converter).
The GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H uses the A75 Hudson and has 2 advantages over its closest brother, the A55 Hudson. These offer FIS-based Switching and Native USB 3.0 support for up to four ports. FIS-based Switching is a built-in SATA port multiplier which allows for simultaneous communications across attached drives and multiple devices on a single port. I don’t expect the latter to be used as 6 SATA III ports (5 headers and 1 on rear IO) is plenty for budget users. This difference is often the reason you need a RAID controller card to take full advantage of a RAID array. The A75 Hudson FCH on the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H does not need a dedicated RAID card thanks to this feature. This potentially makes the A75 a unique option for something like a NAS or file server.
The A75M-UD2H has several great features in addition to chipset features. Every USB port has 3x USB Power Boost to boaster performance of USB devices by preventing power dips. This is particularly useful for charging power hungry devices like the latest tablets. Each port also has its own fuse so in the unlikely event a USB port is blown, it will not affect the operation any other ports.
The A75M-UD2H also supports boot drivers over 3TB, GIGABYTE’s AutoGreen, On/Off Charge, and EasyTune6. It has dual BIOS with an automated recovery system. GIGABYTE does not skimp on quality either as the A75M-UD2H is an Ultra Durable 2 class board with 50,000 hours Japanese caps and lower RDS MOSFETS. This is a lot to pack into the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H at an MSRP of $109.99 US.
What’s in the Box?
The price range for this motherboard is mid-ranged and the box contents are no different. You will find an Installation Guide, Motherboard Manual, and Driver DVD. The Motherboard Manual is well written, well laid out, and usually provides more than enough information for basic setup. It even includes a flow chart of the most likely causes to common issues encountered during an initial build.
Also in the box is the back panel I/O shield, Dolby Theater case badget, and 4 SATA III cables (two with 90° angles and 2 flat). Some boards in this price range will come with only 2 SATA cables so the extra set are a bonus. The included driver DVD obviously includes all the drivers for your system, including a trial offer for Norton anti-virus software and Adobe Acrobat Reader. I am not sure why a DVD was needed, but I guess its just another sign CDs are dead.
Test System Setup
We wanted to see how the A75 platform compared to a more expensive platform in the AMD family. The GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 is a little over twice as expensive so it should help to determine if the price is a result of lower quality components or fewer components, and if the APU concept is a good one.
The following are the test systems are the systems as configured in this article:
APU Test System
- CPU: AMD A8-3850 @ Stock & AMD A6-3650 @ Stock/Overclocked
- Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H
- GPU: GIGABYTE HD 6670 OC 1GB & A6 On-die 6530D
- RAM: Kingston HyperX @ 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 T1 2x2GB
- HDD: Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB
- PSU: Antec HCP 850W
- Sound: On-board Realtek ALC889
- OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- USB 2.0 Test: Corsair Flash Voyager 16 GB
- USB 3.0 Test: Rosewill SATA3 to USB 3.0 & eSATA Enclosure + Samsung F3 1TB
Phenom II Test System
- CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T @ 2.9 GHz with 2 cores disabled
- Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 AM3+ socket (rev. 3.1)
- GPU: GIGABYTE HD 6670 OC 1GB
- RAM: Kingston HyperX @ 1600 MHz 8-8-8-24 T1 2x2GB
- HDD: Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB
- PSU: Antec HCP 850W
- Sound: Onboard Realtek ALC889
- OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- USB 2.0 Test: Corsair Flash Voyager 16 GB
To limit the number of variables, the A75 system and the Phenom II system are identical except for the processor. To ensure this does not skew the results I disabled two cores and down clocked the Phenom II X6 1100T to 2.9 GHz. This gives a slight edge to the A8-3850 in memory intensive tasks, but again we are testing the motherboards not the CPUs. This will give us the foundation to compare against other A75 boards in upcoming reviews.
Benchmarks and Software
The software for the tests include 3DMark11, PCMark07, Alien Vs. Predator DX11 benchmark, Resident Evil 5 benchmark, CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1, OCCT, FurMark Burn-in, and RightMark Audio Analyzer 6.2.3.
3DMark11, Resident Evil 5, and Alien Vs. Predator are being used to determine if gaming performance is different between these two boards using the same video card. CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 is my testing software for SATA 2.0 and USB 2.0/3.0 throughput. This test will focus more on how well the A75 Hudson FCH compares to the AMD SB850. RMAA 6.2.3 is the test bed for audio performance as the board has claimed enhancements to audio fidelity.
Finally the OCCT and FurMark Burn-in software is for stability testing when overclocking. While I ran other tests to ensure stability, a combination of these two seemed to weed out instability the fastest.
BIOS and Overclocking Notes
The BIOS is not the full graphical UEFI like you can find on other AMD A75 based motherboards. GIGABYTE uses a more traditional looking Hybrid UEFI which looks like a traditional BIOS but has many of the UEFI features within. While I was a little disappointed, GIGABYTE quickly made up for it with some nice features you can find in their BIOS. The CMOS settings you use can be stored into profiles with custom names. The GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H also has build in dividers for all the buses controlled by the primary system clock. At certain intervals, these dividers will kick in and bring those bus figures back into a working range.
While these dividers can limit performance at times, it helps to minimize things hindering your overclock to just the CPU and RAM. This results in any bus value between the 100 MHz default to 150 MHz usable. While the sweet spot for overall performance for me was around 132 MHz, I could get Windows to boot at 145 MHz (CPU @ x26 multi for 3.77 GHz). The only downside to the BIOS is the IGP controls are found in 2 locations for no reason. Let’s see if overclocking has any effect in some of our benchmarks.
PCMark07 – Total System Performance
Instead of testing a specific aspect of your system, PCMark provides a total system evaluation by testing a computers capability to handle certain tasks. These include test editing, web browsing, loading programs, loading games, 3D rendering, and more. This time I am going to use the AMD A6-3650 using the on-die 6530D GPU. This should be a good example of the bare minimum you would get from a quad-core AMD APU.
It is hard to provide context to this score as I found many websites currently still use PCMark05. I compared the overclocked results to another system with similar results on Futuremarks site with an i3-2120 with Hyperthreading and a dedicated 550 Ti GPU. I also encourage you to download the free version of PCMark07 and test your own system for comparison. You will find it will take a laptop costing well over $700 or a desktop built specifically for gaming to outperform the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H with any quad-core APU. This is also only with AMD’s entry level A6-3650.
3DMark11 – Synthetic Graphics Performance
Lets start the testing with Synthetic gaming performance and compare the two systems as a whole. 3DMark11 should gives us a good idea how the A75 board would measure up to a similarly clocked Phenom II processor such as Phenom II X4 925 and Phenom II X4 945. As we know the L3 cache does help in gaming, but how will it measure up the memory bandwidth advantage of the A75 system with the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H?
The advantage here goes to the 890FXA-UD5 and the Phenom II. This difference can be attributed to the 6MB of L3 cache of the processor as games typically favour a large cache. The difference is honestly very small, so lets see how that translates to the real world with game specific benchmarks.
Resident Evil 5 and Alien vs Predator – Real World Graphics Performance
Both tests were done at 1920 x 1080 resolution and the benchmark default settings. For Resident Evil 5 this would be quality, texture, and shadowing on High, no AA, no Vsync, and no motion blur in DirectX 10. AvP’s default is texture on high, shadowing on high, AF x16, AA off, and all DX11 features enabled.
This shows the motherboard does not create any limitations in graphical performance. I am sure these results would diverge with high-end GPUs such as a AMD HD 6970 or Nvidia GTX 570, but it would be related to the CPUs not the motherboards. The on-die Northbridge could potentially be choked by a dual GPU card such as the AMD HD 6990 or Nvidia GTX 590, but I do not see anyone using these cards in an APU build of this price point.
Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1 – SATA3 (6 Gb/s) Performance
The Phenom II system uses a standard Northbridge/Southbridge configuration with the Southbridge handling SATA and USB. Here we are looking to see if moving the IO a step closer to the CPU will improve throughput or not. This will also compare 890FX Hyper Transport link to the A75M Unified Media Interface in which the latter has much lower bandwidth.
GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H SATA 3Gb/s
GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 SATA 3Gb/s
The A75M-UD2H is a little better in all these test with the exception of the 4K QD32 and Sequential write test. It is good to see the UMI link clock rate of 2 GHz does not limit data throughput. This being the case, the UMI should only be a bottleneck in extreme data throughput scenarios such as 4 or more SSDs at 400MB/s+ speeds in a RAID.
Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1 – USB 2.0 Performance
Since we are already testing data throughput, I thought we would move on to the USB 2.0 testing. This is the same comparison as the SATA 3Gb/s testing, but with the front USB ports instead.
GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H USB 2.0
GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 USB 2.0
All tests with USB2.0 have the A75M-UD2H within 1 MB/s of the 890FXA-UD5. A difference in performance this small is negligible as several factors can change this in real world applications. The comparatively lower bandwidth of the UMI link between the APU and the Hudson FCH is simply not a factor. Even if you connected a device to all 10 USB 2.0 ports and all 4 USB 3.0 ports, they would not create enough data throughput to cause an issue.
USB 3.0 Performance
As you can see from the results, the USB 3.0 port is working perfectly. These numbers are well within the average performance of the 7200 RPM drive being used and not too far away from tests done on previous 890GX and 890FX boards with a SATA3 drive in the same enclosure. So it appears SATA3 does have a bit of an advantage of SATA2 with USB 3.0. It is nice to see you can use this with an external drive enclosure and maintain the performance of any HDD installed in it. With new USB 3.0 chipset options other than the Renesas/NEC coming to light, we’ll be keeping an eye on this test for future reviews.
RightMark Audio Analyzer 6.2.3
These tests were done with an audio crossover from the stereo out to the mic in jack on each board as per the instructions provided by this benchmark. The quality of on-board audio on a motherboard is important since replacing it with a dedicated audio card is slightly to a lot more expensive depending on the quality level you want to achieve. It also uses up an available expansion slot. Most users will be using the on-board audio, especially those on a budget who would likely choose an APU setup for its value proposition.
I can’t say I am surprised with the results. I included the MSI 790GX-65 as it was a mid-range board like the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H. The primary weakness is the microATX size of the A75M-UD2H limits space available for audio capacitors. All three of these motherboards use the same Realtek ALC 889 audio codec and only differ in the number of audio caps. The MSI 790GX opted for less caps to cut cost to the end-user, while the A75M simply did not have enough room for the option of more caps. Hence the average performance of the two boards vs the larger 890FXA-UD5.
Power Consumption
This test was done with OCCT stressing the CPUs and FurMark Burn-in test stressing the GIGABYTE HD 6670. The most power hungry task someone may use their system for is Fold@Home. The FurMark and OCCT allow me to simulate this by using both the APUs CPU core and the HD 6670 maxed out, drawing as much power as the systems will allow. Note that gaming with these systems will use much less power. The standard operational voltage for my A8-3850 is 1.4V and the PII 1100T is 1.35V.
The Gigabyte A75M-UD2H + APU unsurprisingly uses less power. While only an 8 watt difference at maximum, there is a 24 watt difference at idle. This is due to a better power management and lack of a dedicated Northbridge chip in the APU system. If you would like to see more details about power use for the GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H + an APU, refer to my APU review. There you can see power use for this board in various configurations.
Final Thoughts
The GIGABYTE A75M-UD2H was great to work with most of the time. Once you have your system set in the BIOS the way you want, it is easily one of the faster booting systems I have seen. POST, AHCI HDD detection, and S.M.A.R.T. are all much faster on this motherboard. This can be a double edge sword as responding to me pressing “delete” to enter the BIOS would occasionally be missed. Holding or rapidly pressing “delete” made no difference. But for most users considering this platform, set and forget will probably be the order of the day when it comes to settings in BIOS.
The MSRP of $109.99 US puts the A75M-UD2H right in the middle of FM1 socket boards. The feature that separates this board from the pack is the built-in dividers for the bus which made overclocking almost too easy. While we did not cover overclocking specifically in this review, we have covered it in our review of AMD’s new APUs, the A8-3850 and A6-3650 for the A75 Platform. It’ll take you through everything you’ll want to know about what makes this platform special and more.
Overclocking aside, this platform was built for the mass market of casual gamers, and not so much the enthusiasts. If you need a low power, low noise, everyday “daily driver” computer, an affordable microATX HTPC board, or are simply on a tight budget and want as much computing as possible, a computer built on the AMD A75 platform with this board would be a great buy. GIGABYTE has done a great job interpreting what the A75 platform represents and complementing it with several of their own great features.
Pros:
- Well Designed Board Layout
- Extremely Easy Overclocking
- Low Idle Power Use
- One of Each Display Output (HDMI, DP, DVI, VGA)
Cons:
- Outdated non-GUI BIOS
- EasyTune6 Often Requires a Restart to change settings
Overall Rating: 8.5/10.0
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