A Closer Look at the GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3
A Closer Look at the GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3
At first glance, the overall layout is decent but there are certainly areas that need improvement. First and foremost, the location of the 4-pin CPU power connector is just plain awful. When that power cable is plugged in, there is simply no way to achieve a clean and tidy look to your system as it makes for a cable management disaster. It should have been placed on the top edge of the motherboard. Secondly, the two yellow USB 2.0 headers (above the southbridge heatsink in this picture) are very awkwardly positioned as well. Thankfully, with eight USB 2.0 ports on the I/O panel, few will actually make use of these oddly-placed headers.
On the positive side, the ATX power connector, the floppy connector and the IDE connector are all intelligently located at the edge of the motherboard, which is both convenient and functional. The SATA ports are located inwards, but since they are positioned near the bottom of the motherboard the potential for conflict with other components is reduced. Only an unusually long PCI (7"+) or PCI-E x1 (6.25"+) card would block any of the SATA ports.
Although not evident in the picture, this motherboard is actually a little bit narrower than the ATX standard, measuring 8.25" wide instead of the usual 9.5". As a result, it should be easier to install in smaller cases.
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As you can see, the general CPU socket area on this motherboard is quite clean. If you remove the CPU cooler bracket (you just need a phillips-head screwdriver), there really is a blank space to work with, which is ideal for those who utilize more extreme forms of cooling and who need to insulate around the socket area. Likewise, this should ensure compatibility with just about any air or water cooling solution on the market.
This motherboard features a 4+1 phase VRM power design consisting of bare MOSFETs and high-quality sealed Yageo R50 ferrite core chokes. For those of you wondering, the additional 1 phase is dedicated to the integrated memory/HyperTransport controller. This design officially supports 140W CPUs, and it should have no issues handling highly overclocked Athlon II and Phenom II processors.
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Next we have Gigabyte's traditional red and yellow memory slots, which support a total of 16GB of DDR2 system memory. The memory slots are positioned very close to each other, so you should not plan to use four modules with thick heatspreaders. This model has been outfitted with a single-phase power design for the memory, which should ensure stable voltages to your DDR2 modules.
At the edge of the motherboard, there is the perfectly located 24-pin ATX power connector and one of the four system fan headers.
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The heatsink on the SB700 southbridge is quite tiny, measuring 1.5" by 1.5", and only 6mm tall. Will it do an adequate job at cooling? We'll find out a little later.
Starting clockwise from directly below the southbridge, there is the green IDE connector, the six vertical SATA II ports, the colour-coded front panel header, the black floppy connector, and the two misplaced USB 2.0 headers. The SATA ports support RAID 0/1/10.
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The overall expansion slot layout and assortment is quite good when you consider that the 770 northbridge was designed to only support one graphics card. There is one full-sized PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, four PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots. As is the case with nearly every motherboard on the market, if you install a dual-slot graphics card in the PCI-E x16 slot, you automatically lose access to the PCI-E x1 slot directly under it, but with 3 spares that's no big deal.
The MA770-UD3 is outfitted with two physical BIOSes courtesy of the DualBIOS feature. This ensures that should a BIOS flash go awry, you won't have to RMA the motherboard to Gigabyte. Instead, the backup BIOS chip is automatically initialized and you can simply boot normally.
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Starting from the top-left, ITE IT8720F chip is an I/O controller which is responsible for hardware monitoring along with fan speed management and it supplies the legacy floppy support and PS/2 ports. The Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip supplies the two FireWire/IEEE 1394a ports and header while the Realtek 8111C is a gigabit LAN controller which runs on the PCI-Express bus. The Realtek ALC888 is a high-quality onboard 8-channel HD audio codec.
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Here we see that the 770 northbridge chipset benefits from its own single-phase power design (2R0 choke). The passively-cooled northbridge cooler is made entirely of aluminium and it is held down by plastic push-pins. However, it is quite loose and has too much wiggle room for our liking. Will this impact its cooling performance? We will be testing the efficacy of this cooling system in a later section.
Although we have already discussed the 4-pin CPU power connector's poor placement, we would like to see the 4-pin connector phased out in favour of the more robust 8-pin connector that is quickly becoming standard.
As you can see, the rear I/O panel is well-equipped. From left to right, there are the PS/2 ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors, two FireWire ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, one Gigabit LAN ports, and the six audio jacks.
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On the back on the motherboard we can spot the large metal backplate behind the CPU socket area. This is a design feature that ensures heavy cooling solutions will not bend and potentially damage the PCB or even the CPU socket itself. The other image is the two plastic push-pins that secure the northbridge cooler. We would always prefer to see actual bolts being used, especially since this cooler is quite wobbly as mentioned above.
