Introduction

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Gigabyte has been a major contender in the motherboard market for many years now, and has easily secured a place in the market that many seek to attain. With a recently renewed product focus, and several new product lines with very specific color schemes, Gigabyte sent us their newest platform product Gigabyte A75-UD4H, based on AMD's "Hudson" chipset and the AMD FM1 socket. The FM1 platform isn't intended to be a maximum performance platform, but rather seeks to renew entry-level performance and connectivity, but that hasn't prevented Gigabyte from providing us with a board with some serious overclocking potential, the Gigabyte A75-UD4H. We strap in our APU, and take the Gigabyte A75-UD4H for a ride around the track.

Specifications

<table class="tputbl">
<thead>
<tr>
<th colspan="2">Specifications Gigabyte A75-UD4H</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tr>
<th scope="row">CPU SUPPORT:</th>
<td>AMD Vision Socket FM1 Fusion APUs</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">POWER DESIGN:</th>
<td>CPU Power: 8+2 phase <br />
Memory Power: 1 Phase <br />
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">CHIPSET:</th>
<td>AMD A75</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">INTEGRATED GRAPHICS:</th>
<td>AMD Radeon HD 65xxD(via installed CPU)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">MEMORY:</th>
<td>4 x DIMM, Max. 32 GB, DDR3 1066 to DDR3 2000
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">BIOS:</th>
<td>Gigabyte AMI BIOS with 32 Mb Flash ROM </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">SLOTS:</th>
<td>2 x PCIe 2.0 x16 Slots (x16/- or x8/x8)<br />
3 x PCI-E x1 2.0 Slots<br />
2 x PCI Slots<br >
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">HDD CONNECTIVITY:</th>
<td>5 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s (AMD A75) <br />
1 x eSATA 6.0 Gb/s</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">NETWORKING:</th>
<td>Realtek 8111E PCIe Gigabit Lan</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">PORTS:</th>
<td>10 x USB 2.0 ports (2 at back panel, 8 at front panel)<br />
8 x USB 3.0 ports (4 at back panel, 4 at front panel) <br />
1 x PS/2 Keyboard connector <br />
1 x HDMI port <br />
1 x DVI port <br />
1 x VGA port <br />
1 x DisplayPort <br />
1 x RJ45 LAN connector <br />
7 x Audio port with 6 analogue audio jacks + 1 Digital <br />
1 x IEEE 1394a Header
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">AUDIO:</th>
<td>Realtek ALC889 HD CODEC</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">FORM FACTOR:</th>
<td>ATX Form Factor( 305mm x 244mm ) </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Biostar FEATURES:</th>
<td>

@BIOS
Q-Flash
Xpress BIOS Rescue
Xpress Recovery2
EasyTune
Smart Recovery
Auto Green
ON/OFF Charge
Cloud OC
Q-Share
Ultra Durable3

</td>
</tr>
</table>

AMD A75 Chipset

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With the closing of the second quarter of 2011, AMD launched their latest platform based on Fusion technology, which brings high performance GPU capabilities and CPU functionality together in the same socket, for modest cost. Featuring AMD's first sampling of 32 nm technology from Global Foundries, the new APUs from AMD mate with the AMD A75 chipset, which not only features built-in SATA 6 Gb/s drive connectivity, but also USB 3.0, simplifying board design for manufacturers, while allowing greater functionality for the end user.

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Toeing up the power consumption at a limit of 100W, the new AMD APUs offer fantastic video performance not seen anywhere else in onboard solutions, with a Radeon 6550D GPU nestled right next to a full quad core CPU in the A8 APU models. For those needing a bit more performance, but still focused on budget performance, the addition of specific affordable discrete GPUs, matched in performance to the APU's onboard Radeon cores along with CrossFire functionality, brings the complete platform to incredible performance levels for little cost, setting the stage for the next era of office desktop functionality, while offering enough grunt for a little bit of gaming entertainment, too.

Gigabyte has stepped up to the plate on the A75 platform, with a board offering a lot of extra features, and boosting some serious overclocking skills, right on the box. We snare the bit of blue lightning on our test bench, and give our APU a high-speed workout.

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Packaging

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H arrived on our doorstep clad in a white box, common for Gigabyte, with a red racecar and "Super 4" emblazoned on the top half. We find several product technology logos as well, with the actual board's name near the bottom. Flipping the box over, we find a few snippets explaining the Gigabyte-specific technology the board has included, with a small image of the board itself on the right side.

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Lifting the lid, we find the board accessories on top, while underneath sits the board itself, wrapped in a anti-static bag that does allow for close inspection, and shows some pink foam to help stabilize the MOSFET cooler during shipping.

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H comes with most of the stuff you'll need to get up and running, including four blue SATA cables that match the board's color scheme. A full listing of what we found in the box is below:

1x I/O Shield
1x User Manual
1x Quick Install Guide
1x Driver CD
4x SATA cables with locking pins
1x Dolby Case Badge
1x Gigabyte Case Badge

The Board - Layout

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Looking at the full board, we see that Gigabyte has stuck to their blue/white color scheme for entry-level and mainstream products, with a bit of gun-metal grey on both heatsinks. This relatively new color palette really adds to a quality feel, and specialized color-themes are something we see manufacturers throughout the entire industry adopting. The rear of the board is nice and clean, but there is a JTAG interface near the socket backplate that might be an issue with some aftermarket coolers.

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The socket area of the Gigabyte A75-UD4H is very well laid out and ready for sub-zero cooling, with plenty of room around the socket for insulation. Gigabyte has even placed a matching blue heatsink bracket here, a nice addition that really helps tie the theme of the A75-UD4H together. The rear of the socket is covered with a black-finished blackplate, with the center of the socket rear having a few empty component placings. Normally we like to see no empty spots here, but we'll talk more about how the A75-UD4H clocks later.

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It's up to board makers to choose slot configuration, and Gigabyte has seized this opportunity to offer two physical PCIe x16 slots that switch to an x8/x8 configuration when both slots are populated, for optimal discrete Crossfire support. We also find three PCIe x1 slots, good for audio cards and other devices, with a couple of PCI slots added to the bottom for legacy devices, and for some overclockers, PCI POST Display cards. Equipped with four DIMM slots, each supporting DIMMs with a maximum density of 8GB per DIMM, the A75-UD4H supports 1866 MHz memory speeds natively, if for only two sticks, while offering a bit more in raw speed with an overclock.

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Gigabyte has gone the extra mile with front I/O connectivity, too, offering dual USB 3.0 front panel connectors, but it's also worth noting that there are still very few cases on the market that can support use of both, and there was not a USB 3.0 expansion bracket in the box. We find the RESET/POWER header fully labelled for easy connection, and next to the USB 3.0 headers is a USB 2.0 header intended to be used with the ON/OFF Charge functionality, with a red socket to point that functionality out. At the back of the bottom edge find the front audio header with a 1394a header nearby, and filled with a dust cap, while the remaining three headers are for USB 2.0 support, making for a total of eight internal USB 2.0 ports when paired with the red-lined socket seen in the first image.

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There are a total of five SATA 6 Gb/s ports found on the A75-UD4H; four being right-angled, with the fifth port facing out from the board. The AMD A75 chipset supports six ports natively, so at first this struck us as a bit odd, but looking at the backplate, we find the sixth located here, in the form of a yellow eSATA 6.0 Gb/s port in the middle. A 1394a FireWire port is directly above, with the only two USB 2.0 ports on the backplate above that. The LAN port and two USB 3.0 ports are just to the right, with a 6-port audio block next, while to the left we find the display outputs and an optical audio output; another pair of USB 3.0 ports, and combo keyboard/mouse PS/2 port to round it all out.

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The chipset cooling is a large low-profile plate with simple Gigabyte branding on it; below which we find the AMD A75 chipset, mounted at a 45-degree angle to the board itself, reminding us of AMD GPUs. This may hint at things to come, with AMD currently offering the best price/performance ratio in the high-end segment with its 69XX-series cards.

The Board - A Closer Look

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Starting with the BIOS, Gigabyte has equipped the A75-UD4H with a dual-BIOS solution, making for easy recovery when overclocking, and let us tell you, with this board, it really works. Employing an Intersil ISL6324a VRM controller, the A75-UD4H features an 8+2 VRM configuration with a two-part high/low MOSFET configuration, although the dual NB/GPU phases do feature dedicated input drivers as well. We find a single-phase DIMM VRM next to the memory slots, which doesn't seem like much, but did prove more than adequate during our testing phase.

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We find two separate Etron J168A USB 3.0 controllers onboard, each one dedicated to the near-by rear I/O tower with USB 3.0 slots. It's thanks to the use of these controllers that the Gigabyte A75-UD4H has a total of eight USB 3.0 ports, although this design decision can lead to installation issues in certain scenarios, as there are only two USB 2.0 ports on the rear I/O.

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Realtek provides both audio and LAN controllers for the A75-UD4H, with the high-end, but common, ACL889 controller found for audio, while LAN support comes via the also common RTL8111E controller we have seen on many products throughout the industry.

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We find an ITE IT8720F for voltage monitoring and fan control, while the provided ICS 9LRS4850AKL PLL controller conforms to the FM1 AMD specifications, yet offering a bit more flexibility than some other options on the market today, can have a significant impact on overclocking with the A75-UD4H, too. FireWire support is provided by a VIA VT6803P controller, which not only powers the port on the rear I/O, but also offers an internal header too.

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The matching cooling solutions provided with the A75-UD4H blend well with the color theme the board has, while providing more than ample cooling. The chipset cooler is very large, with many protruding fins, but maintains a low profile so as to not interfere with expansion cards. Gigabyte has chosen to use a standard thermal interface material, one that very closely resembles chewing gum, even with it's pink color, yet proves to provide excellent thermal transfer. The MOSFET cooler is equipped well too, with the thermal pad making full contact with the MOSFETs it sits over, as you can see by the impressions left in the pad.

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We want to take a minute here and point out that although the chipset cooler employs screws that are easily removed, the cooler's design is such that its removal may not be so easy, as when we attempted to remove it for pictures, we found that the cooler's stand-offs backed out of the cooler rather than the screws coming out of the stand-offs, which could lead to board damage if care is not taken. Given that the cooler is so large, and thermal interfaces do provide more than sufficient contact, we suggest that users do not attempt to remove these coolers, and if there are any issues with them, to return the board to Gigabyte for repair, although we are confident that such will never need happen, thanks to an excellent design.

BIOS Walkthrough

<table class="tputbl">
<thead>
<tr>
<th colspan="3">BIOS Options</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Clocks</th>
<th scope="col">Range</th>
<th scope="col">Step Size</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">CPU BCLK:</th>
<td>100 MHz ... 500 MHz</td>
<td>1.0 MHz</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">PCI-E Frequency:</th>
<td>100 MHz ... 500 MHz</td>
<td>1.0 MHz</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Memory Dividers:</th>
<td colspan="2"> x5.33 (1066 MHz), x6.66 (1333 MHz), <br />
x8 (1600 MHz), x9.33(1866)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Voltages</th>
<th scope="col">Range</th>
<th scope="col">Step Size</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">CPU Voltage:</th>
<td>+0.00 V ... +0.40 V</td>
<td>0.025 V</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">DRAM Voltage:</th>
<td>1.025 V ... 2.135 V</td>
<td>0.005 V</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">APU NB Voltage:</th>
<td>+0.00 V ...+ 0.30 V</td>
<td>0.025 V</td>
</tr>
</table>

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H has a old "standard layout" inside the BIOS, providing an interface that is both simple, and easy to use. There are no flashy UEFI graphics, nor mouse support, but even so, the layout that greets you on the main page is very aptly labeled, and to our delight, has the important part, the tweaking section, first and foremost.
Once inside the "Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker" section, We find all the needed voltage and clock options to overclock, as well as a few extra options whose functionality, at this point, is a bit suspect, but may relate to future planned "unlocked" AMD APUs. The memory section is quite thorough too, offering enough options that allowed us to scale up the memory frequency fairly high; in fact, much higher than we had ever expected. We've included two images showing the options available, just because there was so much offered here.

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The remaining pages, of course, hold a lot of board-specific options, such as chipset options, date and time settings, as well as a host of other features commonly found on all motherboards.

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The devices page itself offers a fair bit of options, but rightly so, given the added extra components the Gigabyte A75-UD4H has. The "Power Options" page leads to standard stuff, as does the PC health page, where you can also find options for PWM or manually controlled fan speeds.

All of that just about sums up the BIOS. It's simple, doesn't contain a lot, but does the job near perfectly. We would have perhaps enjoyed a UEFI implementation like we've seen on other products, that offer a few things like mouse support, and the option to capture BIOS screenshots easily, but because the A75-UD4H is so modestly priced, yet packs a ton of features, we do find it hard to "knock" anything we've seen here. There are a few certain things, like CPU multipliers available that offer no performance boost, just like the NB multi options, yet at the same time, the BIOS comes ready to overclock, and does a pretty good job at ensuring that any overclocking is easy, and when things go wrong, the board quickly boots from the backup BIOS, leading us to never have to clear the CMOS because of a wrong setting. With that in mind, we have to give kudos to Gigabyte here, because they really did deliver with the A75-UD4H.

Board Software

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The first bit of software we are going to look at here is Gigabyte's "@BIOS". This handy tool will allow you to not only flash your board's BIOS, but will also allow you to save your current BIOS, as well as download updated version from the Internet. While many are still not completely comfortable with BIOS flashing inside Windows, we are very glad to see a tool provided with as much functionality as "@BIOS" offers.

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The second included tool is one we see on most Gigabyte products, EasyTune6. Upon opening the application, it offers a listing of the installed CPU's vital statistics, a good start to show you where your system sits, right this moment. EasyTune6, on the A75-UD4H, also offers GPU clock speed adjustments, and an SPD table listing for memory, handy for figuring out what needs to be set in BIOS.

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The monitor page lists voltages and temperatures on separate pages, while the SmartFan page offers fan slope adjustments via a simple interface, handy when attempting to overclock a bit. The main part, the "Tuner" page, offers voltage and clock speed adjustments, but these are a bit limited in what functionality they offer.

We also found some antivirus software a few other goodies on the disc, but as these software are not provided by Gigabyte directly and are made by third-party companies, we won't go into too much detail about them other than to say that there a few options there, should users find them useful.

Test System

<table class="tputbl">
<thead>
<tr>
<th colspan="2">Test System</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tr>
<th scope="row">CPU:</th>
<td>AMD A8-3850 APU<br />
2.9 GHz, 4 MB Cache</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">Memory:</th>
<td>4 GB DDR3 (2x 2 GB) Mushkin 996826 PC 12800</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Cooling:</th>
<td>Corsair H70</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">Motherboard:</th>
<td>Gigabyte A75-UD4H
AMD A75, BIOS version F4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Video Card:</th>
<td>Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">Harddisk:</th>
<td>Western Digital Caviar SE 16 WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA2<br />
Seagate Barracuda LP ST2000DL003 2TB SATA3<br />
Iomega eGo BlackBelt 500GB USB3.0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Power Supply:</th>
<td>Antec TPQ-1200OC</td>
</tr>
<tr class="alt">
<th scope="row">Case:</th>
<td>Test Bench</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Software:</th>
<td>Windows 7 64-bit, ATI Catalyst 11.7</td>
</tr>
</table>

Initial Setup

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Initial setup with Gigabyte's A75-UD4H was very easy. We did have to update to the most recent BIOS to get DDR3-1866 booting properly, but once we did, we found no issues at all, except one. With only two USB 2.0 ports on the rear I/O, and using a USB drive to install Windows from, we found ourselves short of ports for the drive, keyboard, and mouse, leading to at least one of those devices being non-functional during the installation. Of course, use of a USB hub, or maybe not using the mouse would have fixed that problem, but either way, it's an issue that could possibly arise, yet it's also easily circumvented too.

PWM Power Consumption

Since one of our first tasks was to truly verify system stability, while doing so, we measure CPU power consumption. We isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings, as well as total wattage passed through it. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design.

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There's not much to be said about the power consumption of the A75-UD4H, as we haven't spent a lot of time with current FM1 products. However, we did notice that idle wattage is right in the middle of the pack for the lowest results, at just 4W, while the load wattage is not all that high either, quite a fair bit still under the APU's ACP specification. As we add more products for this platform to the charts, a better picture will emerge of just how well the A75-UD4H performs in regard to power consumption, but it's worth noting that this product does not feature any specific power-saving features like Gigabyte's own "D.E.S." hybrid hardware/software solution.

CPU Performance Results

SuperPi

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Super Pi serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. Platform performance isn't really all that high to begin with, but we expect Gigabyte to perform well here, given the flexibility we saw in the BIOS.

wPrime

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wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. Results here are a little bit lower than expected, but with no L3 cache on our APU, it's not very surprising to see seemingly low results.

WinRAR

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Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. Like the other benchmarks we've seen so far, the result is low, but sometimes benchmarks don't tell the full story.

AIDA64

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We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Here, we were rather surprised by the low write performance, as this platform is generally expected to be a bit better than its 45nm brethren. At the same time, we had pretty good results when overclocking, which may hint that there's some untapped performance available via BIOS tweaking.

HandBrake Encoding

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Handbrake is used for encoding testing, where we perform a real-world test by encoding a video file to another format. Again we see low results, but that's more platform performance than indicative of board performance directly.

CineBench Encoding

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Cinebench really seems to put this platform at the bottom of the pile, and tied in with the rest of the results we've seen, you might wonder what AMD was thinking. Truth be told, however, during regular usage on the Internet, and even gaming, performance seemed more than adequate, and actually fairly impressive considering the AMD APUs are CPU, GPU, and chipset, all wrapped up in one, with very low latency thanks to everything being so close together.

3D Performance Results

Once we completed our CPU test suite, we took some time to play some games with the TPU community to get an overall feel for gaming on the Gigabyte A75-UD4H. After a couple of days we settled in to complete our 3D benchmarking, feeling confident that the A75-UD4H was going to put on a good show. Let's take a look at what numbers the board provided.

3DMark11

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3DMark11 serves as a good example for what this platform is capable of. Although still at the bottom, it's not by much, and given that we know the CPU performance is a bit low based on the other, 3DMark helps serve to show that the lack of CPU power doesn't really affect GPU performance too much.

Civilization 5

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Our first real-world 3D performance test comes in the form of Civilization 5, using the included benchmark. We let the game recommend us settings, and then disabled V-SYNC and AA to eliminate bottlenecks introduced by the GPU itself. Performance is exactly where we expected it, showing no significant issues.

F1 2010

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Our second real-world 3D performance test comes from CodeMasters, in the form of the "F1 2010" included benchmark. We let the game recommend us settings, which included 8xAA with our newly added HD 6950 2 GB from Sapphire. We were quite surprised by the results here, and that's an understatement. Of course, updated drivers are going to have their effect as well, but this is the perfect example of just how really good this platform is.

Drive and Audio Performance Results

Our drive and audio testing differs a bit from the rest of our testing, for several reasons. First of all, when it comes to drive performance comparison, differences between the P55 and P67 chipsets do leave the P55 platform with a distinct disadvantage, such that we have excluded those results from our reporting. And finally, with audio, we do not list any numbers except for those reported by the product we are testing in order to provide the most information possible, as each audio CODEC will behave quite differently, and each board does not employ the same CODEC. As such, there is no standard we can use other than the numbers themselves. You can always check our other motherboard reviews in order to make direct comparisons to audio performance.

We've tested each drive interface separately, in order to provide the most complete numbers possible. Employing HDTune Pro for all of the testing, we tested each drive outside of the OS environment, using a separate OS on a separate drive, although we do use drives with a fair amount of data on them to simulate performance in real-world situations. For audio, we've changed how we report the numbers provided, using screenshots from the textual results that RMAA provides.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H sits right in the middle of the pack here with SATA 3.0 Gb/s performance, but with performance from top to bottom within a few MB/s, there's not much difference from the top, either.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

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With just two tenths of a megabyte difference from the top in SATA 6.0 Gb/s, the Gigabyte A75-UD4H put on a good show here, for sure.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

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There's no doubt the potential here, with the Gigabyte A75-UD4H coming out right on top.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

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RightMark Audio Analyzer gave the Gigabyte A75-UD4H a good result, with little to no problems noticed. Line noise was a bit high, but that could have simply been an artifact of the board's input, and is pretty good for an onboard solution.

Overclocking

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H proved to be an overclocking treat, racing past barriers set with Phenom II CPUs, into what is uncharted territory for AMD memory performance, allowing for a whopping 640 MHz overclock on our Mushkin sticks. The clocks you see above were fully stable through games, stability tests, and everything else we could throw at it, making it a quick and snappy system, especially when paired with an SSD. Overclocking helped show how highly optimized the platform is too, with almost every MHz showing some difference.

Overclocked Performance Summary

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SuperPi, when overclocked, completed over 5 minutes faster than at stock, a near 25% boost overall.

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wPrime, on the other hand, didn't show such significant time gains, however still did get a sizable boost.

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Cinebench echoed the other two very closely, at this point, not much of a surprise.

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F1 2010 provided the biggest surprise, a near eight FPS increase from stock.

Value & Conclusion

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The Gigabyte A75-UD4H is available now with an MSRP of $129.99

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Full of features
Good memory support
EFI BIOS with support for 3TB+ drives
Excellent overclocking abilities
Truly raises the bar for entry-level performance and functionality, with minimal cost.

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Limited included software
No obvious added power-saving features
Almost too much functionality for an entry-level platform
May be overlooked by many, just simply because of the platform it supports.

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<th>9.5</th>
<td>We don't know where to start with the Gigabyte A75-UD4H. It's almost perfect. There are but two things we can really find lacking, the old-style BIOS, and number of available USB 2.0 ports, which itself isn't a problem for near anyone providing they use a case.<br />
The GA-A75-UD4H clocks well, has more USB 3.0 ports than you'll need, both on the blackplate and available via internal header, and has more slots than you'll ever need, too. With the Gigabyte A75-UD4H, you can do more overclocking than we've seen in a long time from AMD, another nice added bonus, that takes what seems to be an entry-level platform, to near enthusiast levels. Thanks to AMD's Fusion technology this board is very well equipped to serve in a media PC system or affordable work/productivity PC.</td></tr>
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