Since March 2009 I’ve been proudly mentioning my 3-core box – which I built – a number of times; in both articles on this blog as well as comments on other blogs. As a quick rundown, the box uses an AMD Phenom 3-core Socket AM2+ chip on a Gigabyte GA-M720-US3 motherboard. It’s currently running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and I’ve fitted 8 gigabytes of DDR2 800MHz RAM. (The board is capable of hosting up to and including 16GB of DDR2 RAM, (4 x 4GB sticks.) with a maximum speed of 1200MHz as far as I remember.)

Since I used that board in the construction of my box; which, prior to the advent of Intel Core i5 chips later in 2009, was the only Gigabyte board I know of without built-in graphics capability, it appears to have risen in popularity and also the price has dropped too, even though it’s a rather old board model now. Since the board is becoming such a great budget-build accessory, I felt that it deserved its own little mention on this blog.

In my opinion ts on the small-side small of ATX-sized boards, with an AMD socket AM2+ processor-housing; which means that a Socket AM3 processor will fit nicely into the socket, but will be nevertheless restricted in operation. (Socket AM3 has one less pin than Socket AM2+, so while AM3 fits an AM2+ or even an AM2 socket, (Despite being thus unable to run at its full potential in AM2+ or AM2.) AM2 and AM2+ won’t fit an AM3 socket. – This is probably a good idea too, as AM2, and probably a lot of AM2+ chips too, may well get into difficulties when it comes to utilising DDR3 RAM, which they simply weren’t built to use.)

As far as I am aware, many Phenoms were available in a Socket AM2+ package back in 2009, so finding a new chip to fit shouldn’t pose a problem, even if you have to use eBay or Craigslist. Whilst I run 3 cores on it, the board is capable of allowing a 4-core Phenom to run on it without any problems whatsoever.

It has an nVidia nForce 720D “chipset”: The reason why I put that word in inverted commas is because it isn’t really a chipset at all; more of a single chip. – However it does the business, although doesn’t provide any onboard graphics capability. – On that note, unless you’re using the board to build a server, (Which is a feasible suggestion, especially as time marches on and the board falls out of mainstream popularity.) which you’re only going to control remotely from another computer, then you’re going to have to fit a PCIe graphics card to the board’s single PCIe slot and output graphics from that. No worries there though: I’m currently running a Gigabyte GeForce 7200 GS card on it: 256MBs of dedicated graphics and no problems. The card cost under £25 GBP when bought new back in 2009.

The “chipset” does tend to run rather hot; partially because it has no substantial cooler on it; just a small passive heat-sink. To offset this it’s best to ensure that there is a case fan attached to the box that you’re going to run this board in.

There are also 2 PCIe x 1 slots in addition to 4 PCI slots. I sometimes wonder about PCIe x 1; although a smaller and neater slot, it doesn’t appear to have much advantage to PCI, and the PCIe x 1 expansion cards seem to always be slightly more costly than their PCI counterparts. – Having said that, there’s probably a number of factors that I haven’t accounted for here. Perhaps maybe readers would like to expand on the subject?

Although I’m running 8 GB of RAM, the four memory slots can accommodate up to 16 GB of DDR2 and support the faster 1200MHz DDR2 9600 sticks.

The six SATA ports give it the ability to utilise currently around 12GB of storage. The BIOS allows for RAID configuration also. There are also a single PATA port, and a floppy port too; should you feel the need for some retro-storage. I’m running a DVD-RAM drive from the PATA port.

On the back panel there are 8 USB 2.0 ports, as well as a 4-pin and a 6-pin FireWire port. Despite there being no eSATA port, there are 2 x PS2 connectors, so the older mouse and keyboard still have their uses here. (I run it with a PS2 keyboard and a USB mouse without any problems.)

The analogue 7.1 audio outputs are from a Realtek  ALC888 codec. There are also optical and co-ax S/PDIF outputs.

A UK computer magazine, Computer Shopper, was so impressed with this board that they gave it their Best Buy award during 2009.

Gigabyte GA-M720-US3; an amazing budget-board back in 2009, and still to this day a useful place to use up the spare DDR2 if you can’t think of anywhere else to put it..