GIGABYTE GA-AB350GAMING 3

A sample of AMD’s budget spec

AT LAST, WE’VE WITNESSED AMD’s second chipset, the B350—team red’s answer to Intel’s H270. But is it strong enough to withstand the full brunt of Ryzen’s notorious bugs, while not being at the top of AMD’s pile of enthusiast boards?

Gigabyte’s AB350-Gaming 3 is the first board we’ve tested under this new chipset, it was certainly an adventure. By default, the AB350 should be overclockable, but in our tests, we just couldn’t get that spark to ignite, no matter what settings we tinkered with in the rather limited OC BIOS. Memory support was also lacking. Even with the latest BIOS, our Corsair Vengeance kit was limited to 2,133MT/s. Of course, we could put this down to BIOS bugs, but we’re now two months into the Ryzen release, with Ryzen 5 chips just on launch, and 3 not far behind. So why aren’t these more budgetcentric AM4 offerings getting as much love as the top-end X370 ones from the same company? Your guess is as good as ours.

For each board we test, we check whether our memory kit will operate at 3,000MT/s, then clock down to 2,666 for the rest of our benchmarks. The idea is to bring the spec more in line with what an average Ryzen system should look like. On the Gaming 3, we couldn’t do that, and it shows, with scores plummeting in X265, Cinebench R15, and Fry Render, and memory latency some of the highest we’ve seen.

As for aesthetics, there’s not a lot to talk about. Gigabyte has stuck with the familiar red, black, and silver color scheme we saw with the Z170 Intel series boards, with a chunky black heatsink near the rear I/O, and that’s about it. LED lighting is on board, with one single strip on the right. The feature set is, well, acceptable. There are four SATA 3 ports, two PCIe x16 ports (bear in mind CrossFire and SLI are disabled on B350), and a single M.2 port for a full x4 PCIe SSD, if super-slick storage is your jam. Rear I/O is the absolute minimum, too, with hints of HDMI and DVI-I compatible processors coming down the line soon.

What’s the biggest positive we can draw from this? The price. For $110, it’s hard to argue with how cheap this is, and how easily you can jump on to the platform. Undoubtedly, over time, and with enough BIOS updates, you’ll probably see those supported memory frequencies rise. And hopefully more expansive BIOS options for those looking to tweak their chips a touch higher. That said, for now, if you’re looking for the best board to overclock on, you should go for one of the X370s—Asus’s Crosshair VI Hero or MSI’s X370 Gaming Pro Carbon, in particular, are swell clockers.