Gigabyte AB350Gaming 3
Do away with the howling winds and you’ve got a winner.
There’s plenty of praise to be given for the performance of this relatively cheap unit. But let’s first address something we came to dislike during the testing process: fan noise.
Whoever oversaw the mapping of the default fan profiles needs to go back to the drawing board. Or at least greatly improve the operational fan curve. Because what we found was the fan mounted to the CPU cooler, powered and managed via the CPU fan header on the motherboard, would consistently ramp the fan RPM up and down with such tenacity and frequency that it frankly became annoying. Even at idle. This could be worked around through custom fan profiles, but for many, the expectation is that the Gigabyte engineers have worked this stuff out already so the user doesn’t have to.
Fan profiling gripes aside, coming through like the silicon embodiment of Steven Bradbury, the AB350-Gaming 3 snuck away with four podiums in testing, complete with two victories; one in PCMark 8, the other in 3DMark.
With performance that can rival the expensive boards in the roundup, the AB350-Gaming 3 beats direct competition on features. That is, the MSI B350 Tomahawk is outshone by the extra two SATA3 6Gbps ports on the AB350Gaming 3, as well as the Realtek ALC1220, overshadowing the Tomahawk’s Realtek ALC892.
A few extra volts were required to stabilise RAM, but once sorted, this board delivered overall and quite unexpectedly.