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Gigabyte 880GM-USB3L Review

Umang Gajera

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Introduction

The motherboard which we are going to review today is Gigabyte 880GM USB3L. This motherboard falls in low to mid-end range and provides good set of features for the price. It was around $90-$100 at the time of this review. Like many motherboards out there in the market this one too has a smaller and a bigger brother. 880GM-D2H is a little bit cheaper than this and lacks USB3 support , except for USB3 both the motherboards are almost Identical. 880-GM USB3 being its bigger brother has some extra features and is priced higher as compared to the one being reviewed. When it comes to overclocking this board doesn’t fall behind and is indeed a serious Overclockable motherboard.

First , lets have a look at the box:



Up Close : 880GM-USB3L

Lets take a closer look at the motherboard itself.

The board:

The first thing you’ll notice will be that the motherboard is having all solid state capacitors which helps to increase motherboard’s life. The motherboard is actually laid out pretty good. As you can see yourself it has only 2 DDR3 Ram slots which says “DDR3 1666+” but there is a catch as you will see it in my results.

Rear I/O:


Bundled Accessories

As with other boards in this price range , 880GM-USB3L doesn’t come with much accessories. The bundled items include:


Expansion Slots

Right below the Northbridge the motherboard has got 4 expansion slots:

The northbridge heatsink wont hinder the installation of a “longer in length” PCI x1 card since the heatsink area behind the x1 slot is a bit lower than the PCIE x1 connector.As the CPU socket color sigifies this motherboard supports AM3+ CPUS. This board has got a 4+1 phase for CPU Power which seems decent for CPUs like Athlon X4 considering the fact the the MOSFETS are naked without heatsink and has a 4-PIN connector for CPU power. This mobo seems to best fit with low to medium power consuming CPUs and I won’t recommend using a high power consuming CPU with this mobo unless you’ve got a decent heatsink on the MOSFETs and even if you have then overclocking high wattage CPU might be a nightmare!

VRMs:


880GM-USB3L houses AMD 880G as northbridge and AMD SB710 as southbridge. 880G has an on-chip ATI/AMD Radeon HD 4250 graphics core which can support low-end gaming. HD4250 supports DirectX 10.1.

The 880G Northbridge:


The SB710 Southbridge:


Rear I/O:

The rear I/O connectors are :



Specification

Now I’ll quickly go through other specs as mentioned on the motherboard’s product page:

Audio:

Lan:

Storage Support:


Internal I/O Connectors:

BIOS:




Bundled Apps & Utilities

This motherboard is bundled with many “gigabyte only” utilities which as follows :

Now we looks at the screenshot at some of the User Interfaces of the above mentioned utilities.

Easy Tune6:

Easy Tune6 is a really handy utility to for monitoring the hardware components and also for overclocking frequency and voltages for CPU , FSB , Graphics (IGP). Easy Tune6 requires a reboot for changes to take effect.

Cloud OC:

Cloud-OC is a basically a web-browser based OC utility than can be accessed remotely by setting a password and then logging in to Cloud-OC server via browser. The Cloud-OC server must be running and started in order to control overclocking remotely. It also has shutdown , reboot , sleep and hibernate options which makes this application quite useful.

@Bios:

@Bios is a simple utility to Update BIOS from Internet or locally from file and save current BIOS.

Face Wizard:

This is another Handy app to change the BIOS boot screen to what you want.


Overclocking and Results

As I have mentioned this motherboard overclocks very well. The first thing I’d like to say is about RAM overclocking support. As per specs it supports DDR3 1666+ Mhz Ram but I could very well go upto 2000Mhz without any issues. Northbridge , On-Chip GPU and CPU overclocking from BIOS was a breeze with this motherboard.

The Test Rig:

CPU AMD Athlon X2 CPU – 3.2Ghz
Memory Gskill RipjawsX DDR3 RAM – 1600Mhz CL9
Motherboard Gigabyte 880GM-USB3L
Power supply Cosair CX430W PSU

Following are the different overclock Settings / Profiles I have used for Benchmarking:

Component Stock Settings OC1 Settings OC2 Settings
AMD Athlon X2 3.2Ghz @ 1.4V 3.64Ghz @ 1.4V 4.18Ghz @ 1.52V
GSkill Ripjaws DDR3 1333Mhz 1732Mhz 1920Mhz
880GM Northbridge 2000Mhz 2340Mhz 2600Mhz
880GM IGP(HD4250) 560Mhz 590Mhz 660Mhz

Benchmarking Results:

Benchmark Stock OC1 OC2 Units
Max Memm Score 7.73 8.87 9.79 GB/s
Max Memm Latency 60.7 54.3 49.3 ns
3DMark Vantage P274 P334 P400 n/a
PCMark 2007 1634 1720 1834 n/a
Sandra Vid. Mem Performance 4 4.84 5.4 GB/s
Sandra Vid. Mem Internal BW 6.88 8.6 9.56 GB/s
Sandra Shader Performance 3.12 3.3 3.83 MPix/s
SuperPi (Mod1.5 XS) 1M 24.726 21.966 19.063 Secs
wPrime 32M 47.047 43.052 37.361 Secs
POV-Ray 8.88 7.61 6.9 Secs

3DMark and PCMark Benchmarks:

CPU Benchmarks:

Video(IGP) Benchmarks:

Memory Benchmarks:


Conclusion

As it can be seen that there is some significant performance gains when we compare Stock and OC2 or even Stock and OC1 for that matter. So , from these results what I can conclude is that this motherboard is Indeed Overclocking friendly and a good Overclocker , but still I wont recommend Overclocking High TDP CPUs on this motherboard since it lacks Heat Sink for MosFETs and has 5 Power Phases which is best suited for overclocking low to mid-end CPUs.

Now, coming to Final Thoughs … Gigabyte’s 880GM USB3L gives good performance for its price and Overclocks really well. It has all the necessary features (along with USB3 Support) thats expected from a Motherboard in its class and actually supports DDR3 2000+ Mhz Ram!

Gigabyte’s 880GM USB3L gets a Thumbs-UP from OCFreaks and we Recommend this if you are planning for a budget AMD Rig and Overclocking the heck out of it.

Points:
Features… 7/10
Aesthetics… 7/10
Overclockability… 8/10
Value for money… 8/10
Performance for the money… 8/10

Overall… 8/10

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