Reviews for GigaByte GA-MA78G-DS3H Desktop Motherboard - AMD 780G Chipset - Socket AM2+ PGA-940

Great Board, Great Built-In Graphics

Strengths: Built-in VGA, DVI & HDMI very convenient and on-board GPU is powerful enough to run 1080p Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, as long as you have a reasonably powerful dual-core CPU or higher. Works with Phenom 9850.

Weakness: Because board is brand new as of April 2008 BIOS development is still a little premature. However there are no glaring problems that I have noticed.

I am happy with this board. I love the on-board digital optical SPDIF and have read good things about the Realtek HD audio controller (I believe it has DTS support!). I am running an AMD Phenom x4 9850 and 4GB PATRIOT 1066 Mhz memory PVS24G8500ELK which the MWave install tech tested on my board. As far as the "premature BIOS" comment goes it is because I got hung up for a day or two on a weird glitch. It was the boot order. I had it set to CDROM - ASUSDVD - HARDDISK but 9 times out of 10 it skipped the bootable CD. I tried loading "Optimized Defaults" and the system automatically changed the order to FLOPPY - HARDDISK - CDROM and after that I could boot to CD every time. If doing a fresh install I would recommend doing Vista if you don't have a floppy drive. On a different computer you can copy the RAID drivers from the included CD to a USB thumb drive. The Vista install wizard can browse to USB devices.

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Make sure you get a Rev 2.x board

Strengths: Fast overclockable onboard graphics (of course you're still better off with a discrete PCIe graphics card for serious gaming), excellent CPU and RAM overclocking options for a basic board.

Weakness: I got a Rev 1.0 board. DON'T. Make sure you get a latest revision board as they have better CPU power supply and better Phenom II compatibility.

For a cheap reliable home and gaming PC, pick this motherboard, 2 x 1 GB DDR2 1066 MHz RAM (for XP), a Phenom II X2 550 and an ATI HD 4850 card. Doesn't get easier - or much cheaper - than that.

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Awesome Motherboard

Strengths: Has all AV outs and ins you could want.

Weakness: NA

This board is a great upgrade from what I had. The last one only supported 1 GB of RAM. Of course that was great 7 years ago when I built the computer. No complaints for this motherboard. Everything seems to be working great.

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Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H

TestSeek.com has collected 6 expert reviews for Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H and the average expert rating is 87 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use TestSeek.com to find all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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