 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. Right, so this is about as expensive as it gets for a motherboard that's intended for a platform that's all about the performance of its onboard graphics. The question then is how can you justify it when motherboards all pretty much perform the same if you look at pure CPU or video card benchmarks? Well, for one thing, it looks better with Gigabyte's signature matte black PCB and vibrant green accent G1 series color scheme. And for another, it has more features than most other FM2 Plus boards. Some that on the Intel motherboard side of things you'd have to spend another 40 bucks on a G1 Sniper Z5S if you wanted to get. More on those later though. First, we'll do what's included in the box and a physical tour of the board. So inside, you find an I.O. shield, four SATA cables, and a manual. That's it. For the board, at its heart, we find an FM2 Plus socket with support for the latest AMD Kaveri APUs and last generation FM2 based APUs as well. The VRM power delivery and cooling setup around it is fairly mundane, but AMD's latest CPUs aren't the power hogs that the old ones were. So it's not a concern at all. Speaking of power, the 8-pin and 24-pin connectors are in their ideal locations for easy cable management in most cases. And over here, we've got four slots for dual channel DDR3 RAM with support for up to 2400 MHz RAM and with support for AMP or XMP memory profiles. The board actually supports up to 64 gigs of RAM with theoretical 16 gig unbuffered DIMMs. Front USB 3 is over on the right hand edge. There's a self-bridge heat sink down here that covers up your chipset and you've got SATA 3 ports kind of positioned around it in a location that I guess is not really ideal. But it's not bad either because all the ones coming straight out of the board are going to be out of the way of a dual slot graphics card in the bottom slot. And next to it, you've only got PCI slots. Most PCI cards aren't that long. We've also got gigabyte signature dual BIOS down here with two physical chips. So even if you brick it in the middle of a flash, you are still good to go. And finally, you've got two front USB 2 connectors to go along with that front USB 3. I'd say the PCI slot layout is actually very good. It's Crossfire compatible, but not SLI. This board is. And you can install up to two dual slot graphics cards with two PCIe 1x slots and one PCI slot left, which is a great mix for what I would call like an entry level performance oriented board. The fan headers are located here, here, here and here. I'm a little bit disappointed that we don't have any down at the bottom of the board, but it's your mileage may vary depending on the layout of your case. And now I think we've got to get into the sound implementation, which actually takes up most of the space on Gigabyte's web page for this board. It features a Realtek ALC898 codec, which is quite similar to the ALC889 that Tom's Hardware tested against a $2,000 DAC and found it to perform quite similarly. So we can't criticize their choice of components here. They've also included an isolated PCB section, which has become a popular method of reducing electrical interference among motherboard manufacturers. And it's also designed to reduce interference with a gold shield over the audio processor. I haven't seen it demonstrated that these type of shields provide a tangible benefit, but hey, it's there. Looks cool. Couldn't be bad. So there you go. Stuff you're more likely to notice in actual use is Gigabyte's use of Nichicon Pro Audio Capacitors. They're onboard gain switches that allow you to select either a 2.5x or 6x amplification mode and their upgradable op amp socket. Most people will never use this last feature, and it's not something I really, even really recommend messing around with. But if you want to try out different op amps and see how they color the output sound, then you've got that flexibility. Moving up to the rear I.O., we find the gold-plated 7.1 audio ports. Please note, this doesn't improve audio quality directly, but it can make the ports last longer over time after many insertions. And the last audio-centric feature on the board, which isn't directly related to the onboard audio, but may be important for folks using an external DAC, such as an ODAC or a Fiio E10. And that's a special USB 2.0 connector right here on the back with gold plating, which in itself doesn't matter at all, but more importantly, a separate power source that's designed to minimize power fluctuations. On the back we've also got the usual I.O., so we've got four USB 2.0 ports in addition to the audio 1, 2 USB 3.0 ports, PS2, keyboard-mouse combo port, VGA DVI, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and of course the audio ports that I mentioned before, including optical audio out. It should be noted that onboard graphics is something special on AMD's latest platform, and over its HDMI 1.4a connector with the Kaveri APU installed, the board will support 4K output, but only at 30Hz, which is still great if you're looking to set up a media playback box for your 4K TV. And the last interesting point about the board before we get into our overclocked performance test, are the things that unfortunately I can't validate, but what I will say is that if Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 4 Plus design does improve the board's resiliency against high humidity and electrostatic discharge shocks, then that's something you would want on your board. So now without further ado, I'm going to hand this off to Luke, who took this board for a spin, to give us an idea of what we can achieve by overclocking both the CPU and GPU component of a Kaveri APU. Can we justify a gaming-centric board on this value-optimized platform? I guess we'll find out. Alright guys, if we're reviewing a graphics card, we review it overclocked, and we recommend that everyone overclock their graphics card. On the WAN show we talked about this a lot and everything, but we're not that aggressive about it with CPUs, and there's a reason for that. But with this, what we're overclocking is an APU. It is both graphics and processor in the same thing, and we highly suggest overclocking it, and that is why these numbers are going to be overclocked. We're running the system at 4.4GHz on the processor side. On the graphics side it's running at 900MHz, and we applied 1.525V to it to get these numbers. I could probably get that voltage number lower, just I'm preparing for the WAN show right now and don't have a ton of time. As you can see with our StarSwarm benchmarks, there's a really big improvement due to being able to overclock the graphics card that much. It's a really big, really big jump over the stock numbers. And then in Thief, when we're overclocking memory, which is actually completely different, you see huge jumps again. If you combine those two, it's even more. Overclocking on this platform is very important. If you're buying a Kaveri APU, I almost said CPU there, if you're buying a Kaveri APU, you need to overclock your platform. So that was fun, guys. Like and share this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and leave a comment on the Linus Tech Tips forum linked in the video description. 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