Gigabyte AB350N Motherboard Review – Ryzen 2400G

Introduction AB350N With Ryzen 5 2400G We've had a bunch of motherboard reviews featuring the AM4 socket. However, we typically test our Ryzen motherboards with the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, for so many obvious reasons. However, how do the CPU and the motherboard perform with the more performance orientated Ryzen 5 2400G With Vega? For the purpose of this review, I'll be testing the motherboard and CPU in the standard fashion. This means our 1080 Ti will be in place, thus showing how everything performs in relation to how every other motherboard was tested by us. Of course, I'll also include the CPUs built in GPU performance and links to other features with this hardware as appropriate. Equipped with the B350 chipset, the AB350N-Gaming WiFi promises to deliver amazing performance. All Ryzen CPUs are unlocked, but you need X370 or B350 chipsets to take advantage of that. This includes the 2400G we've tested today, where both the CPU and GPU cores can be overclocked. Please note that the GPU cores are disabled for the dGPU testing. Features and Specifications As you can see, this board may be small, but it goes big in terms of features. There's RGB lighting, USB 3.1, 802.11ac WiFi, powerful sound processing, Gigabit LAN, and even some armour. That's enough to get any system builder excited about this motherboard. Supports AMD Ryzen™ & 7th Generation A-series / Athlon™ Processors Dual Channel ECC/ Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 2 DIMMs Fast 2 USB 3.1 Gen 2 with USB Type-A Feature Intel® 802.11ac Dual Band WIFI and Bluetooth 4.2 card Ultra-Fast PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 with PCIe NVMe & SATA mode support ALC1220 120dB SNR HD Audio with Smart Headphone Amp Realtek® Gigabit LAN with cFosSpeed Internet Accelerator Software RGB FUSION with Multi-Zone LED Light Show design Smart Fan 5 features 5 Temperature Sensors and 2 Hybrid Fan Headers GIGABYTE™ UEFI BIOS™ APP Center Including EasyTune™ and Cloud Station™ Utilities Check out our review of this motherboard with the Ryzen 1800X for an in-depth closer look at what the motherboard has to offer. Testing and Methodology Test Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to motherboard reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Rember that your choice of motherboard, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using the software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Each benchmark runs three times, and the average figure is taken to try to reduce the effect of hardware variation. Of course, any relevant details regarding the parameters will be listed below. Test Systems AM4 Ryzen With Vega Motherboard - Gigabyte AB350 Mini-ITX RAM - GSkill DDR4 3200 MHz Dual-Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Stock Cooler and Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (for dGPU testing only) iGPU - 11 Vega Cores (disabled for dBPU testing) Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Z370 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Dual-channel 16GB Intel Core i7-8700K CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X399 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X299 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 Ryzen R3, R5 and R7 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - GeIL DDR4 2977MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z270 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X99 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM – Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Games Used All games are tested on a 60 Hz display with V-Sync off for all tests. Previously we would use "extreme" presets, but these have now been adjusted to "Medium" or equivalent to better test the capabilities of the CPU, not the GPU. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M Power usage recorded at 1024M 50% complete, thermals recorded at 75% CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Other Notes A rest period of 2-5 minutes is observed between each piece of software allowing the system to return to its idle power usage and temperatures. Background services like Windows Update are checked to not be running during the testing period by setting WiFi to Metered Connection. Thanks Thank you to Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! Synthetic Benchmarks 3DMark Firestrike The Ryzen 5 2400G isn't the most powerful quad-core solution, so it does fall behind a bit on our charts. Keep in mind, this is the cheapest CPU featured on our motherboard charts, but we'll find it some more motherboards to keep it company in the coming weeks to give a fairer comparison. Stock Overclocked Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Despite only featuring PCIe 8x, the 2400G was able to let this motherboard handle PCIe throughput just fine. It scored 5496, showing that 8x is of no big concern on this motherboard, even with a 1080 Ti installed. Stock Overclocked PCMark 10 Express Much to my own amusement, the AB250N scored around the same as the Gigabyte Gaming 7 X399. That's right, the Threadripper vs the Ryzen 5 APU scored about the same, go figure... Stock Overclocked WPrime 32M and 1024M Since our usual AMD motherboards feature the Ryzen 1800X, there's obviously a bit of a large gap in performance. Overclocking did shed that time down significantly though, which is a good sign. Stock Overclocked Cinebench R15 Stock Overclocked Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K Rendering performance was no issue either, hitting just over 30 FPS once overclocked, and the motherboard is letting our budget-friendly 2400G do its job. Stock Overclocked Gaming Performance Paired up with a GTX 1080, we're able to test the performance of the CPU, but also the PCIe throughput and how well the motherboard handles both. Straight away, we can see it's not the fastest, but a lot of that is down to the CPU cores, not the motherboard. Regardless, it's still competitive and is only low-down the chart due to the sheer volume of extreme CPU/Mobos we've tested recently. Hitting 94.4 FPS in Deus Ex, 155.9 FPS in Tomb Raider, 111 in Ghost Recon, and 101 in Far Cry is nothing to moan about though. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Gaming Performance With VEGA iGPU Deus Ex: Mankind Divided The Gigabyte AB350N is a perfect home for for the new Ryzen With VEGA CPUs. It's able to blast through the frame rates with ease, and for clarity, I've shown you results for both the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 VEGA CPUs. It's hard to give much comparison here, as this is our first motherboard review with these new processors, but we'll have more soon enough! 1080p Stock 1080p Overclocked Rise of the Tomb Raider 1080p Stock 1080p Overclocked Ghost Recon: Wildlands 1080p Stock 1080p Overclocked Far Cry Primal 1080p Stock 1080p Overclocked Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption Using one of the lowest powered CPUs we've tested, and this being a somewhat affordable motherboard, it's no surprise that it doesn't use a huge amount of power. It maxed out at just 74.9W without a dGPU, which is just fantastic. Over overclocking didn't take it over 90w, so it should be pretty cheap to run. Stock Overclocked Final Thoughts Pricing AT £105, this isn't the cheapest motherboard you can buy for an AM4 CPU, but it's packing some nice features. The Mini-ITX form factor does carry a premium, but if you're using a Ryzen 5 2400G, you don't need a dGPU either, so the price does balance out in your favour quite a bit. Overview This is the first time we've reviewed an AM4 motherboard with the new Ryzen With Vega processor, the 2400G Ryzen 5. Obviously, it looks like it didn't perform as strongly, but with every other review featuring a more powerful and expensive processor, that's hardly surprising. However, at $169 at launch, the Ryzen 5 2400G is extremely competitive thanks to its powerful iGPU, making it a cost-effective solution when paired with an AM4 motherboard such as the AB350N. More Power We'll have more motherboards coming into eTeknix HQ soon, and we'll be able to see how the AB350N stacks up to the competition with this CPU. However, I'm pretty confident it's going to be one of the strongest performers in its class. It comes equipped with a fantastic level of build quality and design that reflects in its performance. Ryzen With Vega – 60 FPS on a Budget? Check out our feature with the 2400G and AB350N here! With PCIe armour, a nicely designed PCB and robust connectivity, the AB350N is ticking all the right boxes. Those who are building a small form factor Ryzen with VEGA system can benefit from the dual display outputs. With HDMI and DP, you'll have no issues hooking up your display of choice. Add to that the plentiful USB ports, M.2 storage, built-in Wi-Fi, GbE LAN and more, and you're well on your way to a comprehensive system. Value There are cheaper AM4 motherboards on the market. However, for mini-ITX, with this level of build quality, features, and design, the AB350N is worth paying a little bit more for. A good PC starts with a good foundation, and that's definately what's on offer here. Pros Competitive performance Mini-ITX design Armoured PCIe slot RGB lighting Easy overclocking Supports all AM4 CPUs including Ryzen with VEGA Fast WiFi and networking Award-winning ALC1220 Audio Stylish design Cons None