Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H

Gigabyte’s GA-MA78GM-S2H sells for a premium in comparison to the ASUS motherboard, so you’re probably wondering what that extra $10 buys you. Well, both motherboards sport PCIe-based Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Both motherboards rely on Realtek’s 8111C chip for networking duties. Gigabyte however, uses Realtek’s newer ALC889A codec for audio.

The 889A chip supports DTS Connect and boasts a 106dB signal-to-noise ratio. The ALC883 codec used on the ASUS motherboard is Realtek’s value 8-channel offering.


Gigabyte also uses a more robust 4-phase power delivery system with all-solid capacitors for the CPU’s VRM circuitry. In theory, this should give the Gigabyte board an edge when it comes to overclocking.


Gigabyte also provides more connectivity options on the backplane of their motherboard. In addition to the display outputs, you’ll find a FireWire, eSATA, and S/PDIF connections on the back panel of the Gigabyte motherboard. ASUS elected not to include these features on the back of the M3A78-EMH HDMI.

BIOS

Inside BIOS, Gigabyte provides IGP clock settings ranging from 150-1100MHz in 1MHz increments and HT speeds ranging from 200-500MHz in 1MHz increments.

You can also adjust PCIe speeds up to 200MHz, tweak the clock multiplier, and the memory speed.


When it comes to voltages, Gigabyte limits you to 2.15V max on the memory while the North Bridge can be overvolted up to 0.3V over default. CPU voltages up to 1.9V are available in increments of 0.25V, although at the upper end of the spectrum (above 1.6V) the increments increase to 0.50V.

Overclocking

With its 4-phase power circuitry, we focused our overclocking efforts on Gigabyte’s GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard exclusively. We were eager to see how far we could push the $100 board, and we certainly weren’t disappointed!

We started by OC’ing just the IGP. AMD representatives told us that they’d built the platform with headroom for OC’ing during our 780G briefing so we were eager to see how far the chip could go. We decided to go for broke, jumping in 100MHz increments. 600MHz passed with flying colors, then 700MHz. We were pretty nervous at 800MHz, but the IGP ran all of our benchmarks without breaking a sweat.

We cringed at the thought of dialing in 900MHz, so we next shot for 850MHz. Pass. 900MHz? Not so lucky. While Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., and Episode Two ran without a hitch, we weren’t able to get Crysis to run with complete stability. We repeatedly got blue screens after just a few minutes of testing. Next we shot for 875MHz. At that speed Crysis held up a little bit longer, but it still wasn’t completely stable. Ultimately we had to settle on a speed of 855MHz to get the game to run 100%.

Keep in mind that we were able to hit this speed relying entirely on the passive cooling provided by Gigabyte. We didn’t add any additional cooling to the system, not even a nearby system fan. The only fan within the system was the fan provided by the CPU cooler.

Running at this speed without any cooling, the IGP got quite toasty – hot enough to burn your finger if you touched the IGP for more than a fraction of a second – but the system ran completely stable despite this. Obviously in a real world scenario where the system isn’t on a testbed being pushed to the max we would have placed a fan on or near the North Bridge of the chipset to provide additional cooling.

In any case, a 355MHz overclock of the IGP is nothing to scoff at.

With the max OC of the IGP determined, we next set out to see how far we could push the combined Athlon 64 X2 4850e/GA-MA78GM-S2H platform with the IGP still OC’ed at 855MHz. Ultimately we settled on a speed of just over 3GHz at 1.375V of juice:

Not bad for a $100 motherboard and $90 CPU!!!