Product on Review: GIGABYTE GA-AB350-Gaming 3
Manufacturer & Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £109.99 GBP / $119 USD

The B350 chipset is a platform that could be seen as rather underwhelming. This is not though any fault of its own however but with consideration towards the under utilisation of the native USB 3.1 Gen2. GIGABYTE have finally restored our faith and we are happy to point out that the AB350-Gaming 3 does indeed feature 2x USB 3.1 G2 ports at the rear IO, with a total of 13 USB ports available (directly and indirectly via internal headers). Of these, 3x USB ports feature GIGABYTE's DAC-UP 2 adjustable voltage to ensure that your peripherals (and DAC's of course) are supplied with enough 'clean' power to ensure stable operation. We are pleased to report the inclusion of other GIGABYTE technologies such as Dual BIOS along with 'Ultra Durable' Metal Shielding and Anti-Sulfur resistors.

As expected we find the M.2 slot capable of running the latest high speed PCIe SSDs, though more interestingly, GIGABYTE have including a total of 6x SATA ports, which 2x more than what is natively afforded by the chipset. We speculate that the additional PCIe lanes/SATA functionality afforded by the unused native SATA Express featured on the CPU may be leveraged by additional SATA ports (labelled ASATA), which would explain why these two ports are then unavailable when a PCIe M.2 SSD is installed.

One of the more striking aspects of the AB350-Gaming 3 is that it features the Accent LED Overlay similar to that found on the Aorus motherboards, to which you can download a 3D printable document which can be customised to your own liking. This overlay forms part of the 'Surround' RGB lighting experience to which GIGABYTE have included headers for the AMD LED RGB fan, as well as an additional RGBW LED strip header, all of which can then be controlled via the RGB Fusion app.


GIGABYTE on Gaming