Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2V Review
by Brendan van Varik on March 21, 2012 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Llano
- A55
Final Words
Price is quite clearly a key part of this motherboard as it is aimed at the budget end of the market. Overall, considering it costs $65 at Newegg.com, the motherboard performs well and it does manage to give some of the more expensive boards a run for their money.
The layout of the motherboard is fairly standard and it is just like most other boards on the market today. There are only a few little niggles which I have with the boards layout and they are the one fan connector and the positioning of the front panel headers. It may be down to personal preference, but to me, the fan header should have been located on the left hand side of the motherboard and the front panel headers should have been put at the bottom of the motherboard.
As previously mentioned, the BIOS is still an old styled system and there is no graphical implementation. It is reasonably easy to navigate around but it would be nice to have a change from the traditional BIOS layout and get that all important information straight to the user the minute they enter the system.
There is next to no difference in terms of the overclocking abilities of this motherboard. It manages to hold a 140 MHz bus speed which is not far behind the more expensive, A75 alternatives. The overclock is going to be fairly similar across all of our motherboards which are tested due to the voltage limits which we impose.
Performance wise the GA-A55M-S2V was not setting any records, and in some cases it was struggling to keep up with its beefier A75 cousins. No doubt that if we get in more A55 boards to review, the Gigabyte will prove to be an interesting data point across our benchmark suite.
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seanleeforever - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
why not just purchase some DC power supply and take the read out directly? what the system will suck out of the socket can be computed by the efficiency of your PSU at that particular load. (say the system uses 100W, and you know your PSU has 80% efficiency at 100W, then you can compute that you system will suck out 120W from the wall)speaking of which, when will anandtech actually buy some product for testing instead of taking what manufacture 'supplied' parts? because we all know there is absolutely no any conflict of interest when a manufacture 'send' you their 'regular' product for 'free' for this website to write an great review to 'speak truth' about their product.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Actually a 5850 is a smart choice. Maybe not this particular version, but a generic 5850. One might find such a beast for under $100 on ebay at some point in the next 6 months. That would be a great deal for a value gamer.Ratman6161 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I'm in the process of decision making for a low cost, small form factor system for my wife to use. I'm comparing Intel i3 Vs Llano and finding I can get an i3 2125 or a AMD A8 38xx for about the same price and to me it comes down to graphics performance. My take:1. If you want to get the best processing power, go with i3
2. If you want the best graphics you can get without the need for a pci-e card, and processing power is not that important to you get llano.
3. If you want processing power and better graphics too, get i3 with a pci-e card
4. If you want better graphics than Llano offers, once again its i3 with pci-e card
So the only scenario (at least for me) where AMD makes sense is #2 which actually happens to be what we are looking for. Testing it with an add on card doesn't help me. And if you wanted to use AMD with an add on card, you could just go with a cheap Athlon X4 - as you wouldn't need the graphics on the Llano cpu anyway.
loimlo - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
Yes, I'd like to see power consumption figures without a discrete VGA. I'm fine with 5850 given it's a requirement of formula across motherboard reviews, but something like integrated VGA would be welcomed.Btw, does Anandtech consider using smaller PSU in the future review? It seems ridiculous to use 1250W for such an entry-level product. It's unrealistic for mass deployment and inefficient at such low load.
ssj3gohan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
It's good to see other people complaining about this, too. Power consumption is, especially compared to the high quality of their other reviews and articles, an underdeveloped appendage at Anandtech.ssj3gohan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
A lot of sentences and general flow of this article are in my opinion sub-par for a site like AnandTech. It seems like this article was first written in Dutch and then translated straight up sentence-by-sentence into English. It would really help readability if the article were edited by a native speaker.silverblue - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
You may wish to provide examples as I don't see what you're referring to. In my eyes, it's a very comprehensible article and I haven't had to read something twice to decipher what the author is trying to get across.Taft12 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I felt the same way as ssj3gohan when I read the article, here's 3 awkward sentences in a row:"The blue PCB which the GA-A55M-S2V is built on is a typical sighting from the current Gigabyte budget segment. Keen eyes will notice the lack of VRM heatsinks, despite this board being certified to run 100W processors. This will undoubtledly lead to little room in terms of pushing the platform."
Don't get me wrong however, this is a good review and bravo to Anandtech for reviewing more entry-level components. Just peer-review them before putting it live.
ggathagan - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of those sentences.The closest to "awkward" one could get would be the use of "a typical sighting".
Even that, however, is a somewhat common turn of phrase.
If I wrote tech reviews for a popular website, I would get very tired of writing essentially the same thing over and over again.
In that circumstance, I would certainly try to inject a little variety by doing exactly what Brendan appears to have done.
silverblue - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
The only thing I could recommend here is adding a small amount of punctuation, but that's it. For example:"The blue PCB - which the GA-A55M-S2V is built on - is a typical sighting from the current Gigabyte budget segment."