KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

While the overall processor crown went to Intel some time ago the tech market is more than just ‘I am loaded, so give me the best system with a processor costing more than £200'.

In the real world, economy is a big issue and we have all spent time over the past 5 years wondering if we could achieve a similar result with much less to spend.

That is the market into which the AMD APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) range is targeted. With processing capabilities that are similar to what the fastest Phenoms were delivering in the past, this new range of overclockable processors rarely costs more than £100.

The difference is that AMD's APU products come with integrated Radeon graphics on the chip. If you want to play games at lower resolutions and image quality settings, straight from the box – without having to splash the cash on a dedicated graphics card – then these products will have huge appeal.

So, against that backdrop, why would you want to spend almost as much on your mainboard as you would on your processor?

When we put the Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X board through its paces, we could not believe quite how easy it was to achieve high clocks with this board.

Our A10-6800K processor could easily hit 4.6GHz simply by setting the baseclock of 100MHz to a multiplier of 46x. All settings were left on ‘Auto'.

Given that we reckon the maximum overclock available with this particular APU sample was around 4.8GHz, it is impressive to think that even a relative novice could get that close to the max with only a couple of clicks.

Read our review, over here.

Now that the price of this board has settled at just over £80, we're happy to conclude that the Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X was the best Value AMD Mainboard of 2013 – seeing off stiff competition from Asrock among others.

Buy from Overclockers UK, from this link.

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