Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 Review

Test Setup

We've revised our AM4 motherboard test setup since our first review given that we now recommend the Ryzen 7 1700 by far compared to the other two CPUs for the simple reason it costs less and is overclocking-friendly. With a lack of AM4 adaptors in our lab at the moment plus some issues with some of our in-house all-in-one liquid coolers and also concerns on their impact on XFR, especially if they started to fade in terms of performance, we've opted for Noctua's NH-U12S SE-AM4 air cooler, which is more than able to get our test CPU up to 4GHz. We've also dropped PCMark 8's video editing test from our line-up and included Handbrake instead as it's more representative of the demands of a multi-threaded video encoding application.

• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3,000MHz DDR4 RAM
  
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700
  
• GPU: XFX Radeon R9 390X DD 8GB
  
• PSU: Corsair RM850i
  
• SSD: Samsung 850Pro (SATA 6Gbps speed tests); Samsung 960 Evo 500GB (M.2 speed tests)
  
• CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4
  
• Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit

Thanks to AMD for supplying the CPU, XFX for the graphics card, Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, and to Samsung for the SSDs.

Tests:

Content creation
• Cinebench R15
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• HandBrake video encoding
  
• Terragen 4
  
  Gaming
  
• 3DMark Time Spy (CPU Test)
  
  SATA 6Gbps and M.2 Storage
  
• CrystalDiskMark
  
  Audio
  
• Rightmark Audio Analyzer
  
  Power
  
• Power Consumption
  
  Overclocking and EFI
  
• Overclocking discussion and EFI