Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

AMD 880G chipset is a dual-chip solution. As we mentioned earlier, the SB850 (commonly paired with the AMD 890GX) is the first southbridge to natively support SATA-600 ports, and the Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H provides five of the six SATA-600 ports supported by the chipset. These ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The sixth port was routed to the rear panel of the motherboard, making this product to have an eSATA-600 port.

Those five SATA-600 ports are placed at one of the corners of the motherboard, but as the motherboard is microATX, long video cards may block them, as you can see in Figure 4.

Figure 4: SATA-600 ports

The Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H has a parallel ATA port (supporting up to two devices) controlled by a JMicron JMB368 chip. There is also a floppy drive port, controlled by the Super I/O chip (ITE IT8720).

This motherboard has ten USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and six through three headers located on the motherboard. This product also has two USB 3.0 ports at its rear panel, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip.

Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, one standard-sized on the rear panel and one through a header on the motherboard. They are controlled by a Texas Instrument TSB43AB23 chip.

Eight-channel audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed at Realtek’s website. The 880GMA-UD2H comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output and you can add a coaxial SPDIF output installing an adapter on the motherboard “SPDIF_IO” header. The analog audio 7.1 connectors are independent.

The Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111D chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with a PS/2 connector for keyboard or mouse (if you use a PS/2 keyboard, you will need a USB mouse and vice versa), four USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, DVI-D output, HDMI output, one FireWire port, one eSATA-600 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, an optical SPDIF output and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel

As you can see, this motherboard comes with three different kinds of video connectors, but the HDMI and DVI ports cannot be used at the same time.

Other smaller features present on the 880GMA-UD2H include the presence of a legacy serial port (available through a header on the motherboard, but the motherboard doesn’t come with the adapter to use it), and a core unlocking feature, which allows you to unlock hidden cores from certain AMD CPUs (if you are lucky to have a CPU with hidden cores).

In Figure 6, you can see the accessories that come with the 880GMA-UD2H: manuals, SATA and ATA cables, case rear plate, drivers disc, and a Dolby sticker.

Figure 6: Accessories