Gigabyte A75M-UD2H FM1 Llano Motherboard Review

A Closer LookThe A75M-UD2H from Gigabyte uses the Micro ATX form factor and keeps in with typical Gigabyte styling with its blue design. The colour scheme is something that users will either love or hate but the general layout is standard.

The board uses the new FM1 socket, which differs quite a lot from the AM3/AM3+ sockets. Around the socket is the new and improved bracket for fixing your cooler onto. AMD claim this gives increase airflow and better temperatures and does obviously free up some space around the socket. Also around the socket is a single passive cooling block which has a 4-pin power connector just behind.

The only other cooling on the board sits over the AMD A75 chipset and is in the usual place; down the bottom right corner of the board and is very low profile so not to obstruct any expansion cards you may be wanting to use.

Memory support for this board includes four DDR3 memory slots running in dual channel mode and are coloured in sets of blue or white. The board supports up to 64GB of DDR3 1066, 1333, 1600 or 1866MHz memory, though to fill this would require a fair bit of dough as it would require 16GB modules.

Now taking a look at the expansion slots, we can see they follow the colour scheme and includes four various slots in total. Starting from the top we find a PCI-Express x16 slot running at x16, a PCI-Express x1 slot, legacy PCI slot and a second PCI-Express x16 slot which runs at x4. The board also supports AMD CrossFire X technology and has adequate spacing between the two x16 slots to give good airflow, a fantastic accomplishment on a board of this size and form factor.

There is a total of five SATA ports on this board, all which face upwards and feature the latest SATA III 6Gb/s technology and speeds and all run from the A75 chip that sits next to it.

Front panel connectors is fairly simple and is divided into individual blocks including the functionality for a COM port, two USB 2.0 headers, front panel audio, FireWire, front panel buttons and LEDs and a native USB 3.0 header port.

In its usual place, we find the 24-pin ATX power connector, but more interestingly behind it we find a TPM Trusted Platform Module header and parallel LPT header.

Turning the board around to look at the rear I/O, starting from the left we find a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port with two USB 2.0 connectors above it.To the right is a huge array of different display connectors, of which we find the ability to connect via DVI, VGA, DisplayPort or HDMI. Above some of the display connectors we see an optical SPDIF port, whilst to the right is another two USB 2.0 ports, FireWire and eSATA. There are two USB 3.0 ports and Realtek RTL8111E powered Gigabit LAN and at the end a set of 7.1 channel analogue audio jacks for input/output or your audio devices.