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The motherboard is in a micro-ATX form factor that is suitable for many users including a HTPC user that wants a small computer to fit under their HTPC, a computer user that wants a all in one system that doesn’t want to use external graphics cards and doesn’t need a lot of expansion and many other users. The 880GMA-UD2H motherboard is limited by the size on expansion.
Starting at the upper right hand corner of the motherboard, this is the location of the 8-pin power connector the board needs to run the CPU.The board has a 4-pin CPU Fan header right below the 8-pin power connector. There are five PWMs for the 4+1 Power Phases on the board. Directly below the capacitors is the CPU bracket. GIGABYTE has the CPU bracket in a sideways orientation, with plenty of room for after-market coolers on either side of the bracket.
Below the CPU bracket are four DIMM slots for DDR3 memory. The board supports up to 16GB of DDR3 1800MHz memory. Note that the memory controller on AMD CPUs is on the CPU since the launch of the Athlon CPUs. AMD CPUs natively support DDR3 memory of up to 1333MHz and reaching the higher memory clocks requires overclocking of the CPU. The memory is arranged in two pairs of like colored memory slots, to install memory in dual channel mode simply insert the memory in like-colored slots.
The last part of the right side of the board has two chips. These are for GIGABYTE’s patented DualBIOS technology. If the main BIOS crashes during POST, the backup BIOS kicks in and boots the system up. The bottom of the board starts off with an ITE chip followed by the 24-pin power connectors. Above the power connector is a FDD controller, which is a legacy device now. To the left of the 24-pin power is the IDE connector. It is interesting to see GIGABYTE include legacy device support on their latest motherboards.
The left side of the board starts off with the Front Panel I/O. Each connection is color coded and labeled in a chart below it. The board has five SATA 6Gb/second ports. As the SB850 natively supports SATA 6Gb/s there is no NEC controller on this board as many boards have. The board has a red Front USB header for the On/Off charging of mobile devices, two USB headers, a Front Firewire header, a Clear CMOS jumper, the COM port and SPDIF I/O headers.
Onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC892 CODEC. The ALC892 is Realtek’s latest audio offering supplanting the ALC889 that has been in use on motherboards for years. The ALC892 has support for the High Definition Audio standard, with support for 7.1+2 channel simultaneous audio with multi-streaming. The audio also supports Dolby Home Theater and S/PDIF In/Out and CD In. The rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 Keyboard/mouse combo port, a D-Sub port, a DVI-D port a HDMI port, an optical S/PDIF port, a IEEE1394a port, 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports an external SATA 6Gb/second port, 2 USB 3.0 ports, a RJ-45 port and 6 audio jacks for the onboard audio.
