Hardware Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H Review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/09/24/gigabyte-ga-880gma-ud2h-review/1

 

At least it's a pleasure to look at.

Somewhat pointless mb though, nowadays I'm only using AMD chips in budget builds for friends and relatives, and atm I think it's unnecessary to pay for USB3 and/or SATA6 in such scenarios. The money is better spent towards faster CPU.

 

A floppy port on microATX board? Their typical response would be "but customers are requesting this feature". If I were a velociraptor I'd get some cheap second hand mobo instead of building a brand new PC to run DOS.

 

So you indentify that the board would be appropriate for an htpc and also point out that its highlights are the USB3 and SATA 6 ports and yet you test it with a 5870 and a normal hdd thus providing a review which only states the obvious: its not great for gaming.

Excellent work.

 

What I don't understand is that we're told the C300 (being the only drive to make use of SATA 6 atm) works loads better of the Rocket card. So that makes SATA 6 support rather redundant if you really want the extra speed of one of those drives.

USB3 won't be mainstream for some time, and I only use the odd memory stick or card reader etc.

So whilst it make, per se, make a board more "future proof", a don't really see a huge point.

Am I missing something?

 

Nice review, although time for an article with a round-up of micro-atx boards , including best buys that are available for each platform.

 

I actually prefer to have the core unlocker option in BIOS as here than as a physical button on the MB. Maybe a button is a bit more newbie-friendly, but is in fact newbie-unfriendly if said newbie has to tweak settings for the core to be stable. The BIOS should act like a qualifying test, if you can use a friendly BIOS, you can be trusted with these advanced features.

The only buttons I like on the MB are power, reset and clear CMOS (although, how hard is a bloody jumper?). I regard "Turbo" or OC knobs, switches and buttons as useless features.
I'm thinking of adding it to my centrefold profile - Turnoffs: Pointless mobo gizmos.

 

Bit-Tech editors,

There's a typo in the pulldown menu. Page 7 reads "Gaming Perfromance."

 

Nice Micro-ATX mobo for a HTPC but get rid of those dam IDE plugs.

Nice review but here's the real highlight of this article.

"Death Star PC that has the power to simultaneously end worlds and heal dying children"

but if your PC could only do one, which one would you choose?

After deep thought (15 seconds) I chose End Worlds.

 

uh... what is wrong with half the people posting here? seriously, people are either complaining that it has old technology or complaining that it has new technology. if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to buy it. so what if it has a floppy or ide interface, does it hurt anything? no. what else are you going to put in that particular location?
and so what if it has usb 3 or sata 3. maybe someone just wants a budget board that supports those. if someone wants a cheap computer that will last them a long time, its pretty smart to buy a board like this and get new technologies. keep in mind that this is an amd board too. you can use some crappy dual core sempron and eventually upgrade to hex core phenom II whenever you can afford it.

now, stop complaining about a product that is supposed to give less wealthy people a large selection of features.

 

What a shocka! Call the tabloids! PC enthusiasts using a forum to express their...<GASP>...opinions and preferences.
Welcome to the Internet, what took you so long?

 

Kinda useful for installing WinXP - which would be a sensible choice for many performance-critical applications, though Linux would be better for most non-gaming purposes.

As for USB 3.0 - one good reason for having it is for copying full image backups onto an external disk which could then be taken off-site. Such backups (including the whole hard disk) can be dozens, or hundreds, of GBs in size and USB 3.0's 400MB/s transfer rate would be preferable to USB 2.0's 60MB/s.

 

Future proof HTPC anyone?

On-board Graphics,
Perfect upgrade path for CPU's.
Enough slots for ram.
PCI-E for Updated graphics if needed in the future.
SATA3

Nowt wrong with this for a nice HTPC with the power to upgrade when needed.

Regardless... i don't want a Earth Destroyer, i want a PC that can collapse a star.

 

I stand by this and point out that sometimes having a mATX pc can make a difference, being a htpc, workhorse so it can be on 24/7 downloading and storing as also as a LAN gaming rig for being portable.