Gigabyte AB350-Gaming Three evaluation: high-end Ryzen efficiency from a budget-priced board

Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 review

The wonderful Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 is our present choose as one of the best motherboard you’ll be able to jam your Ryzen CPU into. At least it’s till the AMD Ryzen 2 chips come out together with their new 400-series boards… although we’ve received a sneaky feeling issues aren’t going to essentially change that a lot.

Check out our choose of the best AMD gaming motherboards you should purchase proper now.

You may need anticipated to see an X370 motherboard topping our checklist of one of the best AMD boards. But, in actual phrases, there’s valuable little to decide on between the B350 and X370 chipsets in our assessments.

And, contemplating out of all of the Ryzen chips AMD have launched it’s the Ryzen 5 1600X we’re recommending as one of many best CPUs for gaming, spending anyplace close to $200 on a supporting motherboard looks as if overkill.

And so Gigabyte’s neatly priced B350 board is the AM4 mobo we’d be lovingly jamming our Ryzen chips into. It’s solely round $119 / £87, and but, at inventory settings it’s one of the able to any of the AM4 boards we’ve examined.

It truly posted the very best multithreaded Cinebench R15 figures, although the delta between the highest and backside of that benchmark checklist is admittedly fairly darned minimal. That could also be its solely win, however the Gigabyte board is well as  succesful as the remainder. It does share backside spot within the Doom Vulkan take a look at, however once more, we’re speaking a few variance of solely 5fps between one of the best and worst of them.

Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 and AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

More regarding although is the ability/thermal facet of issues. It is the toastiest of the boards, operating hotter at each peak and idle temperatures, and that’s borne out by the actual fact it additionally attracts probably the most juice when operating at full chat. It additionally doesn’t have the friendliest BIOS, nor the simplest overclocking efficiency – we managed the identical 4.05GHz all-core overclock many of the different AM4 boards delivered, however it wanted a bit extra voltage to get there.

But overclocking on the preliminary Ryzen processors has been a little bit of a hit or miss affair – and extra closely weighted on the ‘miss’ facet if we’re being trustworthy. That’s the place the appearance of the X470 motherboards is meant to make some distinction to the second era of Ryzen CPUs. 

Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 backplate

If you’re chasing a multi-GPU setup, this in all probability isn’t the board for you. Gigabyte claims CrossFire assist, however there is just one full x16 PCIe 3.zero socket – the second solely runs at x4 bandwidth, and shares that bandwidth with all of the x1 sockets on the board too.

In a future the place we’re multi-GPU gaming PCs as being the one approach for us to get efficient machine learning AI into our games, along with real-time raytracing, it’s doable that these further PCIe sockets would possibly turn into extra of a deal-breaker. But proper now it’s usually extra ache than pleasure operating a gaming PC with greater than a single graphics card, so for us it doesn’t really feel like a significant stumbling block.

If you’re after a straight gaming board, not one which calls for the kind of value premium rather more feature-packed mobos do, then the Gigabyte AB350M-Gaming Three is an excellent-value motherboard to drop a inventory chip into and simply recreation away, fear free.

SE7EN.WS verdict: 8/10


 
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