Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4 AMD Motherboard Review

WINRAR

WinRAR is easily the most well-known file archiving program. In our test we use the application’s built-in benchmark utility in order to determine memory performance.

Here we see a 11% increase which does not seem like a lot but is a nice bump on a cheap air cooler.

7-ZIP

7-Zip is an open-source, completely free file archiving application which utilizes LZMA2 compression. We use their built-in bench-marking utility to measure our systems performance when compressing files.

We see a 12% gain here which shaves a bit of time off of large files needing to be decompressed.

HANDBRAKE

Handbrake is a popular, free video conversion utility which uses H.264 video encoding. We test our system performance by converting a 1080p video which is 530MB to H.264 in an MP4 container.

We see a see a 20% performance jump here in handbrake on of the most widely used video converters available, nothing to scoff at when you’ve got a a ton of movies you need converted to play on other devices or just trying to save space on your drives.

PHOTOSHOP CC

In our Photoshop CC test, we employ the Radial Blur Test for measuring CPU and Memory performance. It works by applying a complex Radial Blur filter to a high-resolution image (4500 x 3000), and measuring the time it takes to finish the task.

Yet again we see about a 15% boost in performance when overclocked. This kind of jump is solid and should be expected on a similar system.

GAMING BENCHMARKS

All gaming tests are performed with our CPU overclocked to our max speed of 4.1GHz and our GPU at stock/factory settings.

GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Rockstar’s highly successful Grand Theft Auto V features a large open-world with huge draw distances, lots of NPCs and great detail. It is a very demanding game that is wonderfully optimized for PC.

We test with all settings to “High” with MSAA, Reflection MSAA, and ‘Advanced Graphics’ settings turned off, at 1080p.

Here we see our overclock does little to raise FPS, although it does make a difference and helps gameplay feel a bit smoother.

TOMB RAIDER (2013)

The most recent iteration of Crystal Dynamic’s long-running series, Tomb Raider represents one of the best-looking titles on PC to date. Its varied landscapes and beautiful organic environments create a quite graphically demanding title.

We ran this game on “Ultimate” with TressFX and FXAA at 1080p. MSAA and is disabled.

We see a very slight boost in FPS here and it isn’t much to write home about. Frankly though Tomb Raider is very much a GPU bound game.

ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS 

While many looking to build a system on this platform may think $100 is a lot to spend, we here at TechnologyX believe that your motherboard is something you should never cheap out on. Many of the features included in this board won’t be used by many like SLI/Crossfire support, others like the multitude of fan headers, SATA Ports and great overclocking performance debug LEDs, Dual Bios, a power button on the board itself make this an interesting pick.

This board is premium in its design, and build quality, Gigabyte did not forget anything most users would be looking for. The fact is this is one of the best $100 motherboards we have ever used. Its SATA performance was a welcome surprise as well as the all digital power phase design, while it is only 6+2 International Rectifier has done a fantastic job and these things blew us away on the last Gigabyte board we used and still continues to do so.

All in all if you are willing to spend a bit more on a board on FM2 this is the one to buy. With that we give it our TechnologyX Gold award.

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