With all of the excitement surround a CPU launch from both AMD and then Intel some of the smaller products have been overlooked. These are parts like the A75 chipset and the Llano CPU. We have had one of these up on the test bench for a while now. Mostly to run the performance tests and see where this hardware falls in terms of real performance, but also to try it out and see just what it is like to use. After all this is a platform that AMD was putting a good deal of stock in for future sales and market share. We wanted to see what it would be like to actually use one. We have already taken a look at the design philosophy and features So without any further preamble we bring you the second half of our Gigabyte A75-UD4H motherboard review.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. Gigabyte’s A75-UD4H will cost you right around $115 from most e-tailers. We were a little surprised at this price and thought that we would find it at just under the $100 mark. Still, after this initial thought and once we reviewed the performance and options you get with the A75-UD4H we found the price to be acceptable. Plus when you consider that the A6-3650 will only run you $120 you can get a pretty decent entry level gaming platform for around $450 or so. In fact looking around we found several gaming systems pre-built with Windows installed and 6-8GB of memory for less than $500. Not too bad when you think about it.Conclusion -The Gigabyte A75-UD4H is not a showstopper, but it is impressive in its own right. Going into this review we knew that we were not going to see raw computational power and that even our general computing benchmarks would return low scores. What we did not expect was to see very fluid and snappy general usage and solid gaming performance from just the board and APU alone. We began to look at this platform, not in terms of what kind of scores it would get, but what type of experience was it capable of delivering and how would it fit into the market it is presented to. We can honestly see this as the basis for an in-expensive gaming system with multiple GPUs for very high level gaming or as a power efficient HTPC system for connection to your home HTPC. Either way it looks like the Gigabyte A75-UD4H is a good choice if you are looking for a solid base to build on and do not want to spend a ton of money.Discuss in our Forum
