AMD 785G Chipset Launch: ASUS and Gigabyte

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is another sharp looking board. However, it isn't quite as elaborate as the ASUS board on the preceding pages. Instead of miniature sculptures, Gigabyte opted for a heatsink configuration that is all business. Due to the smaller form factor, the UD2H is also noticeably more cramped with every inch of PCB seemingly covered by multiple components.


Despite having less room to work with yet still sporting nearly the same feature set as the larger ASUS board, the GA-MA785GMT-UD2H manages a very practical layout. There is actually slightly more room around the Gigabyte's CPU socket compared to the ASUS board since there are no MOSFET heatsinks to get in the way. However, the DIMM slots are located even closer to the CPU socket, though only by a hair.

The UD2H's IDE connector is located relatively high on the board, above the SATA connectors. The board's floppy connector is located directly above the IDE connector and they are both oriented vertically. However, this shouldn't present much of an obstruction problem since they are located far enough up the board to be clear of the expansion slots.

Like the ASUS board, the UD2H's five internal SATA connectors are tightly clustered together near the bottom-right corner of the board. Their position means the upper most three SATA connectors might be blocked by an extended length dual-slot graphics card. However, this isn't as big an issue as with an ATX board since most mATX builds won't use all five available SATA connectors anyway.


The board offers three internal USB headers for use with front-I/O or other connectors. All three are located directly under the southbridge which should be a good position free of interference with expansion slots. The single FireWire header is located at the bottom edge of the board while the front audio connector is near the middle-left edge of the board, next to the rear-I/O components.

The UD2H's single PCI-E x1 slot is located right next to the northbridge and Gigabyte smartly cut a valley in the heatink to make plenty of room for an expansion card. Like the ASUS board, the UD2H only offers 3 fan connectors, but this is of less concern on an mATX board, since mATX cases don't usually mount as many fans as a typical ATX case.

Overall, the Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is a very well constructed board. Despite the shear number of connectors crammed into the 9.6" square (24.4 cm) mATX form factor, Gigabyte managed to lay out the board relatively well.