Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 Review

Performance Analysis

Despite the fact that the chipset is somewhat cut-down, this didn't have any impact on the storage speeds and looking at how the bandwidth is divvied out, so long as you don't have more than two SATA devices, you'll still get the full x4 PCI-E bandwidth for an M.2 SSD. As a result, even with two SATA 6Gbps SSDs hooked up to the motherboard, the AB350-Gaming 3 was still able to max out our Samsung 960 Evo.

The fresh-off-the-press EFI also lead the board to a number of top spots in the performance benchmarks too - other manufacturers will no doubt catch up as will the speed of other Gigabyte boards such as the Gigabyte Aorus AX370-Gaming 5, which was slightly slower in some tests when we looked at it a week or two ago.


The audio performance was definitely one area that the more expensive boards had an edge - while the THD was lower, both dynamic range and noise were noticeably better on the other models with the Asus Crosshair VI Hero taking a big lead. There wasn't much in it power-wise, though, with only a few watts between the boards at idle and stock. Overall, thanks to a similar overclock to its big brother, the AB350-Gaming 3 handled itself well once we'd tweaked the CPU up to just above 4GHz.

Conclusion

Ultimately a lot will come down to what you want from a motherboard in terms of features. For around £40 more you'll be able to net something like Asus' Prime X370-Pro, which offers more SATA ports, USB ports, fan headers and a few other bits, plus a little more cooling power for dealing with overclocking and slightly more granular overclocking courtesy of an Asus EFI and massive software suite. However, it's still £40 more for features that many don't need, and the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 still includes reasonable audio and RGB lighting.

It's great to see overclocking return to fairly low budget levels, and while it doesn't wow our pants off in terms of looks, features or overclocking performance, it has what most people desire for a budget-conscious motherboard that's able to dish out a decent overclock, even with a Ryzen 8-core CPU. Best of all is that Gigabyte appears to be on the ball with its BIOS updates and the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 is already stable enough for us to warrant using it in our own systems. If you want to go overclocking in the land of Ryzen with a limited budget, the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 is a great buy.