Conclusion

When Gigabyte were designing and building the A55-DS3P they could really have cut loads of corners, after all people expect less of a budget products, but instead the same care and attention has gone into this board as we would expect from a more expensive model, even down to the use of decent Southbridge heatsink and the inclusion of dual BIOS for easy recovery from problems.

In terms of design it could be said that the board should be marked down for lacking SATA3/USB3 but that is essentially what the A55 is all about. For those features we need to look at the A75.

The lack of SATA 3 and USB 3 will limit those looking to use the latest (expensive) devices with this board however on every other level it competes well with the A75. CPU, memory and graphics performance were all near identical to the other models and we had no problems running the fastest APU and GPU around. Overclocking was also quick and simple which added extra performance for the low cost of the build.

On the pricing front there isn't much to say other than this board is great for value, it allows users to decide if they need to pay for high performance connectivity and if not they can save money against the equivalent A75 build that can be put towards another component.

Summary
A solid board from Gigabyte which offers a low cost entry into the APU market.