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The Gigabyte GA-A55M-DS2 motherboard is a compact, Micro ATX board, comprising the AMD A55 chipset and is a generally well-laid out power efficient motherboard.
That said, if you elect to add a dedicated GPU, you sacrifice the PCIe x1 slot, as it is obstructed by the graphics card heat sink and fan, even with a low profile, single-slot design such as the VTX 6450 we used in our testing.
One other PCIx16 slot is fitted to the board. Gigabyte have remained faithful to the company colours, by opting for a blue PCB.
The power connectors are found in the usual top left (40pin) and middle right locations (20+4 pin), with four vertical SATA 3Gb/sec ports, located just below the 24-pin power connector.
The board features two DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting speeds up to 1866Mhz, although 2x4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz modules were used for the testing. A maximum of 32Gb of system memory is supported.
The board features the on/off power charge function, allowing for the charging of USB devices and four rear USB 2.0 sockets are provided, with support for an additional two via headers on the motherboard. USB 3.0 is not supported, however.
We were surprised to see only two system fan headers on the board, one of which is used by the CPU cooler, the other being located at the bottom amongst the front panel connections.
Realtek HD Audio is provided by rear sockets (line in, line out and microphone) and headers for front audio, with up to 7.1 surround sound being supported if an additional front panel HD Audio Module is used. An SP-DIF connection is also provided for optical audio.
PS/2 connectors are provided for keyboard and mouse and video is supported by VGA (D-sub) and DVI-D connectors. Those who may be looking to use this for an HTPC application may be disappointed as no HDMI connection is fitted to the board which means the audio signal will need to be carried via dedicated audio cables. Gigabit Ethernet comes as standard.
The Dual Bios feature is supported, as we have come to expect from Gigabyte motherboards.
