GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3P (rev. 1.0) AM3+/AM3 AMD 970 USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: This board is surprisingly good for what it costs. It has some really useful and unique features. I also have the 990FX version of this board, so I will be comparing the 970 and 990FX G1 Gaming boards at the end of this review.
This board has two PCI-E x16 2.0 slots that support two way SLI or Crossfire. In fact, the first thing that caught my eye about this board is the metal supports surrounding the PCI-E x16 slots. Not only does it look good, it is also an extremely valuable feature. I have a custom liquid cooling loop for my graphics cards and I have often been nervous about accidentally shearing off the PCI-E slots on my boards with the heavy weight of the PCB + full coverage water block. I've actually heard cracking sounds come from a PCI-E slot on different boards when suspending too much unsupported weight on one of them. It's easy to do when you're building a custom cooling loop. Especially when the screw holes rarely line up correctly on the rear IO ports of most cases. And the cases with those cheap plastic locking slides, I definitely don't trust them. I would sooner resort to holding my graphics cards in place with zip ties than rely on those, and in fact, I have. But this board has the stainless steel support frames around its PCI-E x16 slots that give it 1.7 times more protection from vertical shearing force. A feature I was thrilled to see and hope to find it become common in the future.
For a mid range mother board, this one has a lot to offer. It supports 8 core AM3+ CPUs with reasonable overclocking capability. It can support up to 64 GB of DDR3 RAM with compatibility for XMP memory profiles. It has six SATA 6 Gb/s ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 along with a single high speed M2 SSD port. It's got a set of USB 3.1 ports. The onboard audio supports 5.1 DTS and Dolby Digital over optical and up to 7.1 on the analog outputs.
Like most Gigabyte mother boards going back quite a few years, it has dual BIOS chips. This is a welcome feature. I had a Gigabyte UD790 board back when Phenom quad cores first came out. It was one of the earlier dual BIOS boards. I somehow managed to corrupt the primary BIOS during an attempted update and if it wouldn't have been for the back up BIOS, the board would have been bricked.
This board has support for up to 2133 MHz RAM without the need for overclocking the base clock. Setting speed for up to 2133 MHz RAM was simple. I just enabled XMP profiles and it did all the work, it even set the correct timing. There was a time when you had to be careful about which sets of memory you bought and whether they would be compatible with your board. Well that's not something I concern myself with anymore. XMP profiles pretty much takes all the guess work out of setting up your BIOS RAM settings. Even setting it manually, you can just set the multiplier and timings and you're good to go. My 2133 MHz RAM runs perfectly stable on this board. The multiplier only goes high enough to run 2133 MHz, which is why you'll need to OC the base clock if you want to run faster memory. It's not uncommon for people to run 2400 MHz RAM on these boards, but much higher than that and you'll be facing stability issues.
This board can take quite a bit of abuse in terms of overclocking. I was able to run my CPU up to 4.8 GHz at 1.5v and even a bit beyond while maintaining stability without getting too hot. That's running Prime 95 on Small FTT setting. I have a closed loop cooler on my CPU, the H100i v2 and I never saw temps exceed 50C on any of this boards components or the CPU. This board actually has some pretty decent heat sinks for a mid range board. The CPU is powered by an 8 pin power connector. When I was stability testing, the CPU kept throttling the clock speed. In the BIOS there is an option, HPC Mode (High Performance Computing). It just basically stops the CPU from throttling under load. The board will throttle the clock speeds to reduce power consumption, or heat if that's your problem. So I enabled HPC Mode and that allowed me to determine my max stable clock speed. Although, once I started getting into the really high clock speeds, above 4.7 GHz, I started seeing the multiplier being reduced to x7 under heavy load. That is a BIOS issue, which is pretty much universal to all 900 series boards. I did find a work around. I installed AMD Over Drive. In AMD Over Drive I enabled Core Control, which allows you to set the multiplier by each core individually. Then I disabled it and closed Over Drive. After that it stopped throttling my multiplier to x7. It doesn't actually do anything, it's just a quick work around that keeps it from reducing the multiplier to x7.
This board also comes with the very convenient G Connector. It's just a nice little adapter that you can pre-connect your front panel cables to. Making your front panel cables into a plug and play adapter. It will also work on lots of older Gigabyte mother boards. My z68 had the same header config.

Cons: My primary complaint about this board is it does not support the FX 9370 and FX 9590 CPUs. Those chips are virtually identical to the FX 8370 with higher power draw being the one major difference. A close visual inspection of the Gigabyte 990FX Gaming, which does support them, and 970 Gaming SLI boards shows the 990 FX does have a few more capacitors and MOSFETs for the CPU. But I truly believe the 970 would be perfectly capable of running the 9590 at a boost clock of 5 Ghz. When I installed an FX9590 into the 970, it recognized the CPU correctly. It wasn't until I tried to pass a boot test that a warning popped up telling me that the FX9590 wasn't supported.
My second serious complaint is software related. Both the 970 and 990FX onboard audio use Realtek drivers, like most mother boards do. Realtek has been the bane of my existence for years. The audio sounds good and the analog surround sound works perfectly. The digital sound, however, does not and has not for a long time. Sure, it supports 5.1 DTS and Dolby Digital via optical out. But there is no option to select 5.1 as the native output. You can only select 2 channel stereo output, with an option to allow other software exclusive control over the output setting. Which works some of the time. But many games, browsers and video players simply play sound at whatever your default output setting is. Which will always be stuck at stereo. There is software that allows you to choose your output setting, such as Power DVD and far more games support that option now than there were 5 years ago. But not all and it would be such a simple thing to patch a fix for a 5.1 setting. To my surprise and everlasting gratitude, my z97 board has that feature. But, thankfully, it doesn't use Realtek drivers. Actually, I've found that my graphics cards typically have superior audio and more features when compared to most mother boards onboard audio. I can get digital 7.1 output to my home theater via HDMI with my GTX 980 and even many older high end graphics cards. I can also enable 7.1 as the default configuration, giving me surround sound all the time without having to worry about individual software settings.
This board does not support full PCI-E x16 with SLI or Crossfire. When both PCI-E x16 slots are populated, they both default to x8 mode. Really though, that's not unusual. Usually only the high end boards support full x16 in SLI and X-Fire. All the benchmarks and research I've done indicate that there is very little difference in gaming performance between full x16 mode and x8. There may be a significant difference when using a newer dual GPU graphics card or perhaps a GTX 1080. But using a GTX 980 with significant overclock, 1530 MHz GPU and 8200 MHz vRAM, there was minimal to no difference in frame rates in multiple benchmarks. However, there is a significant difference between PCI-E 2.0 and 3.0. This board has native PCI-E 2.0, which is about half the maximum available bandwidth of 3.0 and when in x8 mode it's not much better than PCI-E x16 1.0. Each version essentially doubles bandwidth from the previous version. Although, If you're not running multiple or super high end graphics cards, then that's nothing to worry about. The 990FX Gaming does support full x16 in 2 way SLI and X-Fire.
This boards drivers require Windows 7 and newer. Originally, I had planned to run Vista, but not wanting to push my luck I had to spend quite a bit more to upgrade to Windows 10. I believe you could run this board with Vista, but you would be limited to generic drivers which would limit many of this boards advanced features.
This board has two normal PCI slots. I don't know what's up with that. Very few pieces of hardware made now use PCI interface and pretty much all of them are low end. You'd be better off relying on this boards native features before resorting to anything with a PCI interface.
This board has 4 fan headers. Which is good. But I would have liked to see more. 6 would have been really nice.
This board doesn't have a reset CMOS button or switch. I've owned several boards with CMOS reset, or BIOS reset, buttons. They are such a huge time saver if you're into heavy overclocking. This board has the old style CMOS reset jumper, which is something I would like to see phased out in favor of a button. If you're running multiple graphics cards, especially if they're unusually wide or long, they tend to block the CMOS jumpers on some boards. And if you have a custom liquid cooling loop, that makes resetting your CMOS with a jumper a nightmare.

Overall Review: BIOS settings are pretty standard across all of the 970 and 990 boards. There are a few with superior hardware and custom BIOS features. But this board doesn't really feature anything you can't get from pretty much any other 970 board, in terms of BIOS options. There are a couple problems that I've found that aren't specific to this board, but this board still has them nonetheless. It tends to run your CPU at a significantly higher voltage than what's necessary. If you have the skill and patience, in the interest of your hardwares life span, I recommend stability testing with lower voltage than what the default sets it to. The other issue is also voltage related. The load line calibration, or Vdroop, has 4 settings. This is a very important feature if you're into high overclocks. But the highest setting doesn't work. If you set it to extreme, when the CPU is under heavy load, the screen will turn black and it will crash your PC.
This board has 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports, which I believe is excessive. There really should only be two 2.0 ports and the other two should be 3.0. Most USB 3.0 devices these days are backwards compatible with older versions, but speaking from experience, the speed of USB 3.0 is so much higher than 2.0 that I would prefer as few of the 2.0 ports as possible. This board also has a PS/2 keyboard port. Seriously? If you have a PS/2 keyboard it's time to ditch it and get something newer. I recently got a new mechanical keyboard and it's epic, well worth the cost.
With the PS/2 port, extra USB 2.0 ports and PCI slots, this board is clinging to ancient technology that is better left behind. They should have left those things out and included newer versions. It would make this board more attractive and far more likely to remain relevant in the future.
I was fortunate enough that I got the 990FX version of this board on sale, making it an excellent value. The 990FX supports 32 GB of RAM and the 970 supports 64 GB. I don't know why that is. The 990 supports 2 way SLI and Crossfire at full PCI-E x16 bandwidth where the 970 is at x8/x8. The 990 supports the FX 9000 series CPUs, the 970 does not. The 990 has more capacitors and MOSFETs for the CPU and RAM, giving it more overclocking potential and allowing it to natively support the FX9000 series CPUs safely. The 990 also has larger heat sinks with a heat pipe connecting them all. The 990 has a nice set of power and reset buttons onboard as well as a CMOS reset button. The 990 has a debug LED display, the 970 doesn't. So good luck troubleshooting without one if your 970 won't post. The 990 has a E2200 Killer network controller, the 970 has an Intel controller. I've found that many people don't like the Killer network controllers and prefer the Intel controllers. My z97 has the Killer network controller, which I use as my primary network interface and I don't have any complaints. The 990 has a single USB 3.1 type C, whatever, I've never even seen anything that uses one. I prefer the two standard USB 3.1 ports on the 970.
So, if you're into serious overclocking and/or you're running SLI or Crossfire with 2 high end graphics cards. Or if you want to run an FX 9370 or FX 9590 CPU, then the 990FX is probably the better choice if you don't mind spending a little more money or if you can get it on sale. However, if you're not overclocking or if you're not going to be doing much overclocking. If you're only running one graphics card or 2 mid to low range graphics cards. Or If you want to run more than 32 GB of RAM, then the 970 is the better choice.
Regardless of which one you prefer, Gigabyte makes an excellent mother board at a very reasonable price. I've owned 4 Gigabyte boards over the past 7 or 8 years and I've never had a major problem with any of them. Each time I chose the Gigabyte board, not because it was less expensive, but because it was the better and more reliable board.

Pros: Cosmetic Pros: The black and red scheme are awesome and work perfectly in my sisters graphic design rig, The LED back lighting "I guess you call it" that works with the audio. Is beyond awesome. And if you tape a small strip of white cardboard or card stock along the under side you can make it ultra bright! Hardware Pros" dual video card slots, re-enforced video card slots, M2 slot, Shielding for the audio is awesome, UEFI bios, USB 3.1, Great circuit layout!

Cons: junk!! flimsy heat sinks. BSOD's, clunky bios. runs extremely hot (more so than what it should) it will die quickly. this board just isn't thermally sounds or reliable....

Overall Review: now I remember why I moved away from gigabyte boards, quality has gone down hill over the years.
the board looks amazing, but when it dies you will have the biggest LED paper weight ever....