GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H Mainboard Evaluation

Not too long ago we took a look at an HTPC board from GIGABYTE with AMD’s 780G chipset on it, the GA-MA78GM-S2H.
This board was fairly nice and would be good enough for most HTPC usage. There was a problem though. When GIGABYTE designed it they did not make it able to support the high-end AMD Phenom X4 CPUs. These CPUs have a TDP of 125W (some up to 140watt). This meant that if you were goofy enough (I really do not know why you would put a 9650 or 9850 on this board) you were out of luck. Well GIGABYTE thought that they would like to change this. But they did not stop there, they went out and redesigned the board and added in a few very nice features.  Today we take a look at this evolved new design in the form of the GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H. 

Product: GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H    
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: August 8th 2008
Product cost: $104.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

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{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accesories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The MA78GGPM comes is the usual GIGABYTE style box, this one is white with a purple fade. There are also the usual labels and graphs boasting how good the board is.
On the inside we find the board and some basic accessories. Nothing major but then again this is an HTPC/entry level board.

{mospagebreak title=Specs and Features}
Specifications and Features:
The MA78GPM is quite different from the GA-MA78GM-S2H, the biggest difference is the support for 140W TDP CPUs. Next on the list is an integrated 128MB of DDR3 memory running at 1066MHz but which can be overclocked to a decent 1333MHz. GIGABYTE has also added dual BIOS support and interestingly enough they have changed the spec on the Dolby Surround. On the S2H there was full support for DTS on the DS2H we find only Dolby Home Theatre support. The full specs (taken from GIGABYTE’s website are listed below.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Layout:
As with its older sibling they MA78GPM-DS2H is a MicroATX board. This does limit the amount of space available for peripheral slots, etc. GIGABYTE did not do a bad job at all with the layout. Despite the limited space, you do still have the same problem with the placement of the SATA ports (they are right in front of the PCI ports and can restrict airflow). There is also something interesting with the MCP heatsink. This is much larger than the one on the S2H, and has to accommodate a PCI-e x1 sot.  I have a feeling that any card put in that slot will have cooling issues so I would be careful of what you install there. For testing I had an Asus PE9400 Combo TV Tuner and it did get rather warm during testing.
GIGBYTE has loaded up the DS2H I/O port area again throwing in 4 USB ports, Firewire, HDMI, DVI, VGA and a nice selection of other options.

One thing I am sure you will notice. The DVI here only supports DVI-D, you will not be able to use a DVI to VGA analog adapter with this board.

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
The BIOS on the MA78GPM-DS2H is nothing spectacular, but then again as I mentioned above this is not a high-performance mainboard. There are tweaks and some over clocking features but these are very limited. RAM voltage is limited to 1.8v + up to .3v this gives you a vDIMM range of only 1.8 to 2.1v not much and prevents the use of many of the higher end DDR2 modules. There are a couple of redeeming features. It seems GIGABYTE is allowing you to OC the Built in Radeon HD3200 Core speed. The core can be set from 200 to 2000MHz (Default is 500MHz) this as you can imagine will give you a wide range of performance if you can find the right speed setting.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}
Performance:
For testing the MA78GPM-DS2H I wanted to run through most of the options. I did not test overclocking the CPU as most entry level or HTPC users will not be doing that. I did want to test the most obvious BIOS tweaks. These included testing the system with the Side Port memory disabled. Lastly I wanted to test out hybrid Crossfire but I was again not able to get a card that supported Hybrid Crossfire for testing..  All of the GPU intensive tests are lumped together after my application tests.

System:
AMD Phenom X3 8750
GIGABYTE MS78GPM-DS2H
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX9200D2K2/2G
 Western Digital RaptorX 150
Plextor BluRay drive (for BluRay testing)
CoolerMaster 850 Watt PSU
AMD Stock HSF.
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Subsystem:
Memory:
Memory performance was a little less than I expected. I ran the memory at DDR2 800.

HDD:
Again HDD performance was good but not great. If you are looking to use this board as an HTPC platform I highly recommend running two drives for best performance.
Audio:
Audio on the DS2H provided by a RealTek ALC889A CODEC which supports Lossless BluRay audio playback and Dolby Digital Home Theatre support.
Audio quality was very good; I hooked the MA78GPM-DS2H directly to my 7.1 surround system with the Optical SPDiF connector and was very happy with the sound quality. There did not seem to be any impact in performance using the onboard sound CODEC.

Applications:
HyperPi 0.99b:
A good test of CPU to Memory to HDD performance HyperPi runs multiple (one for each core) versions of SuperPi and gives the time to complete. I used the 32M run for my testing. Audio was disabled due to an issue with HyperPi and the Vista Audio subsystem.

AutoGK DivX encoding:
Transcoding is always a good test of a system, especially an HTPC. The MA78GPM does a pretty good job considering the CPU and memory settings used.

PCMark Vantage:
What review would be complete without this test and of course its twin.

For the numbers crowd here is how the MA78GPM-DS2H fared.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Gaming:
3DMark Vantage:
3DMark Vantage is certainly no friend to the 780GPM. I was not able to run this test in performance mode and in the end I had to settle for running it at the “Entry” settings.  Even then he scores were not impressive even while the UMA GPU was overclocked.

You can see all of the results screens here

Bioshock:
Bioshock was simply not playable even with the UMA GPU overclocked. Although it was not a slide show, the game was so sluggish that it was not fun to play at all. Some tweaking and the complete reduction of visual quality would get you playable frame rates but at that point the game loses its feel.

HalfLife 2 Portal:
Portal was very playable at 1280×768 and while it did not look wonderful it had enough visual quality to make playing fun. Overclocking the GPU core speed to 800MHz certainly added some extra performance and would probably allow you to bump up to next higher resolution or enable some additional eye candy.

HTPC Performance:
Since the MA78GPM-DS2H is a perfect board for an HTPC I took a look at HTPC performance including BluRay playback. Using Vista’s built in Media Center and an Asus PE9400 I checked to see how well this system would work as a DVR. For the most part everything ran smoothly, but I would recommend either a larger single drive or two smaller drives with one set to be the recording drive. This will help improve DVR Performance.
BluRay and SD-DVD performance:
For Both BluRay and SD-DVD performance the 78GPM performed very well, BluRay video running HDMI out was crisp and clean. Audio was also sharp. I watched the Fifth Element and I am Legend in BluRay, both of these films were a pleasure to watch running on the GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H,

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The MA78GPM-DS2H will set you back about $105.00 this is not a terribly bad price but is a little more than I would have thought. I was expecting a sub $100 part for the performance that I saw.
Warranty is GIGABYTE’s stock warranty covering defects etc for a period of 3 years from the date of manufacture.
 
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I am not sure what market AMD is pushing the 780G at. I keep hearing how it games better than Intel yet if what I saw is considered better, I am afraid to take a look at the Intel offering. To put it plainly the 78GPM-DS2H is not a gaming board on its own. If you hook up Hybrid Crossfire then maybe you could play games with decent resolutions and eye candy, but not as it is. For basic computing use it is great. The board is somewhat inexpensive (although the price could be lower), fairly quick and has options for future upgrades. For an HTPC system it is perfect. You have a PCI-e x1 slot for a TV tuner, a PCI slot if you want to add in a better sound card (although you could go PCI-e and use the x16 slot) HDMI1.3 support with HDCP, the SidePort memory helps in BluRay playback, and the MicroATX form Factor allows you to slip this into a small and stylish case. So to wrap it up… Gaming – Big No
Basic Entry Level computing – Thumbs up
HTPC use – Two thumbs up and a bag of popcorn.

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