Overall and Final Verdict
The motherboards name actually ended up being surprisingly fitting. The AB350 Gaming 3 ends up being a really a good A to B board. It gets you to where you need to go (good performance) without breaking the bank. They accomplish this with a much shorter list of features than the X370 boards, but you still end up getting exactly what you need. The board still has more than enough SATA ports, an M.2, and you even get the metal shields on the PCIe 3.0 slots. The board itself might look a little bare, but they did still give it an all black PCB and a nice red and black theme, you just give up things like I/O covers and extra heatsinks. Gigabyte even slipped in a little RGB lighting including an RGBw header to run your case lighting right off the board as well. Not bad for what I would consider to still be a budget gaming board.
The performance was surprisingly good and you don’t really give up anything in stock speed performance compared to the much more expensive X370 boards. They did bundle in a sketchy network card that underperformed a little, but I still consider that to be a good tradeoff. Beyond that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more memory adjustment being available in the BIOS and a few more USB ports on the rear I/O would be really nice. The board does have display connection options for the upcoming AM4 based APUs, but there is still room.
In the end, the Gigabyte AB350 Gaming 3 is exactly the type of board I would be looking for when building a budget build. At $109.99 it is almost three times cheaper than some of the X370 boards but you are only really giving up a few things. On top of that its still going to look good in your build.
Live Pricing: HERE
