From left to right: (1) PCI Express x1 slot, (1) PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x16 bandwidth, and (2) PCI slots. Along the edge of the board are COM and 1394a firewire headers.

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H has five SATA 3Gb/s ports which can be run in RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD modes. This corner of the motherboard houses the front panel header,the three USB headers, and a system fan header. Above this is the IDE connector... all of these connectors in such a tight space makes good cabling a must when using the GA-MA785GMT-UD2H.

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H supports up to 16GB of DDR3-1066/1333/1666(OC) memory in four DIMMs, or 4GB for 32-bit operating systems. Memory can be overclocked to 1666MHz if it will tolerate it.

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is a socket AM3 platform, so it maintains support for Phenom II and Athlon II processors.

The Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H's passive cooler can become quite hot to the touch after extended IGP use (typcially in 3D applications). Even with active CPU cooling, it's recommended to have little airflow passing by the AMD 785G chipset heatsink.

The AMD 785G chipset that powers the Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H is a brand new design from one of the biggest microprocessor manufacturers. Let's take a close look at what's going on inside it...