Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Motherboard Manufacturer Gigabyte Category Motherboard Socket Socket AM2/AM2+ Chipset AMD 780G - DDR2 Editor Winston Chim Share    digg this! "The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H is a feature packed motherboard that give mainstream users and HTPC enthusiasts everything needed for a compete and affordable system. "

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Gigabyte takes the AMD 780G chipset and produces an impressive all-in-one motherboard that could appeal to HTPC enthusiasts and mainstream users.

INTRODUCTION

Having an integrated all-in-one solutions sounds good, but what about performance? Well, in the past the performance of an all-in-one motherboard used to be quite poor, compared against a system which had a separate motherboard and dedicated graphics card. To change all of this, chip giant Intel, along with AMD/ATI and Nvidia have each developed their own integrated chipsets that have given some respectable performance boost, both in Windows and in average gaming. Intel offered their 945G, which was good at its launch a year and half ago, but now it's kind of dated. They have plans to release something better later this year. Nvidia released their nForce 630i/7100 integrated chipset, which offered graphic performance similar to a Geforce 7100 GPU. Still it's a little dated, but they do have plans to released a newer and updated chipset.

And finally AMD/ATI ... they announced something special at the Cebit 2008, which was pretty impressive. They released their new 780G chipset, and all-in-one integrated solution that would blow its competition out of the water. AMD/ATI claims that their new chipset can offer its users impressive performance right out of the box. AMD's 780G chipset has integrated graphics that's offers performance equivalent to a Radeon HD3200 (the lower end of the Radeon HD3xxx series), and what's more, it offers suuport for DX10 and a unique feature called Hybrid graphics technology. This feature gives scalable gaming action on any Windows Vista® PC ... plus additional performance from the AMD 780 Chipset, when paired with a compatible ATI Radeon graphcis card. This all sound very exciting, but can AMD really deliver?

In this review, we take a look at the Gigabyte's GA-MA78GM S2H motherboard featuring the AMD 780G chipset. The motherboard comes in a micro-ATX form factor, and supports all AM/AM2+ processors from AMD, Hyper Transport 3.0, as well as DDR2 ram. But what's even more appealing ... is the fact that this motherboard is fully HD ready, supporting HDMI, HDCP, HD audio with optical SPDIF, and even has eSATA connections. For the HTPC enthusiast, it's one motherboard you can't ignore.

Looking at the specifications, I'm not expecting the onboard graphics to outperform a dedicated GPU ... I mean, the graphics performance is, at the end of the day equivalent to a Radeon HD3200. However, I'm more interested in its stablilty, compatibility and overall performance during Windows Vista. Could this motherboard be the answer to every HTPC enthusiast, or is it just an ordinary all-in-one motherboard?

We will be testing this Gigabyte GA-MA78GM S2H with an AMD Athlon FX-62 (AM2) processor which runs at 2.8Ghz, as well as 2Gb of Adata DDR2-800 ram, 120Gb HDD 7,200rpm (8mb cache), and a PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU. Both the BIOS settings and graphics memory buffer was set to auto for maximum compatbility. Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our OS

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM S2H motherboard.