Gigabyte’s AB350N Gaming Wi-Fi

The Media Center Choice.

Price $ 155 www.gigabyte.com/au

ITX

systems are just what the doctor ordered for a compact home theatre or living room PC. For this purpose, AMD’s Ryzen APUs are an excellent choice thanks to their powerful integrated graphics, low cost, and excellent multimedia capabilities. You’ll need a quality board that supports the key features needed for media centre use, though. Our choice of motherboard for this purpose is Gigabyte’s AB350N Gaming Wi-Fi.

VIDEO CAPABILITES: THE DEFINITIVE FEATURE

Let’s get to the really important stuff first. If you’re building a compact media centre PC, a key consideration is the HDMI port. Gigabyte officially claims the port only supports HDMI 1.4, but users across the web are reporting successful HDMI 2.0 testing. This means the AB350N will support that all-important 4K/60Hz figure. The second thing to consider is the codec support offered by the Ryzen APUs. This is another bit of good news as the APUs support the latest codecs, such as VP9 and HEVC Main 10 at 4K. This means things like 4K Netflix and YouTube, as well as 4K streaming via apps like Kodi, will all work properly. CPU load will be very low as the heavy lifting is done by dedicated hardware. You’ll need the latest Radeon Adrenalin driver to maximise functionality though - it adds support for PlayReady 3.0 DRM. There’s that dirty word: DRM. It always seems to penalise the legitimate users, but that’s a story for another day.

With all that in mind, let’s look at the other key aspects of this capable and affordable little board. It’s not the kind of board you’ll use to overclock to any meaningful extent, though you can if you choose. There’s four SATA ports and an NVMe supporting M.2 slot. 802.11ac is important for streaming media and we’re pleased to see Gigabyte went with the ALC1220 codec, which is often omitted on boards in the price range. There’s Realtek Gigabit LAN, which mightn’t have the reputation of the Intel NICs but, for media streaming purposes, will do an identical job.

The rear I/O is impressive. There’s the 802.11ac Wi-Fi antenna ports, PS/2 port, and a GbE port. There’s plenty of USB ports consisting of four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports,

It’s not the kind of board you’ll use to overclock to any meaningful extent, though you can if you choose.

and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. Lastly we can’t forget that all-important HDMI port, plus a single DisplayPort V1.2.

ITX BORN TO BE HTPC

Gigabyte has produced an excellent little motherboard that’s simply perfect for the heart of a compact media centre PC. It’s got the all-important video support and makes full use of the capabilities of the Ryzen-with-Vega graphics APUs. It’s got quality audio and a great set of USB ports for a board in this price range. Grab a mini ITX case and load it up with drives, or connect it to a NAS and stream away to your heart’s content. An ITX system with the Ryzen APU packed into a subtle HTPC case will look right at home on your AV rack and happily power your home entertainment system for years to come. CHRIS SZEWCZYK