FM2 Motherboard from Gigabyte Marries Micro-ATX with Dual 3D BIOS

Now that we have finished giving people around the world a reason to clamor for AMD, we are back to the little things that act as the pedestal on which 20% performance advantages over NVIDIA (in very specific games at least) are placed.

Gigabyte is the one facilitating a slight rise in hype for Advanced Micro Devices, having completed the F2A75M-HD2 entry-level socket FM2 motherboard.

Entry-level might be too harsh a term though. While the 5-phase VRM powering the FM2 CPU socket may be fairly basic, the board still has all it needs to acts as the platform for a more than decent personal computer.

Yes, there is only one PCI Express x16 slot, so no SLI or CrossFireX multi-GPU setups, but then again, even one video card is more than good enough for games today.

What's more, the two DDR3 DIMM memory slots support DDR3-1866 MHz memory, which is quite fast when 1066/1333 is seen as standard spec.

In addition to these features, the mainboard gets a legacy PCI slot and a PCI Express 2.0 x1 interface.

Furthermore, while the majority of USB connectors are 2.20/1.1, four USB 3.0 can still be found (two on the rear panel, two via headers).

Speaking of which, the I/O panel at the back includes three video ports (DVI, HDMI and D-Sub) and 6-channel HD audio, plus Gigabit Ethernet and serial (COM) ports.

As for storage, four SATA III 6.0 Gbps connectors, with support for RAIS 0, 1 and 10 modes, have things well enough in hand.

Gigabyte chose the modest A75 chipset to drive its F2A75M-HD2, but that didn't stop it from tossing in the benefits of the AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS, nor from installing two BIOSes and the 3D BIOS technology (it gives a graphical representation of the motherboard).

The price is of $70 / 54-70 Euro and shipments, as far as we can assume, will begin in mid-November, like for Piledriver-Based AMD Opteron CPUs and tablets based on AMD's Z-60 APU.