This means it is perfectly capable of accommodating the latest graphics cards, although it is important to try and use a graphics card with the same graphics card interface of PCIe v2.x, as anything below will not reach the motherboard's potential, and anything above will have its performance slashed to the bandwidth maximum of the Gigabyte GA-970a-D3P's PCIe v2.x. There are 2 PCIe x16 slots on this motherboard. Any system build that uses this motherboard therefore requires a separate graphics card, or a processor that has a GPU on the same die, such as AMD APU processors. The Gigabyte GA-970a-D3P does not support onboard graphics. Generally speaking, only high performance hard drives, specifically solid-state drives, will be able to take advantage of the bandwidth potential of SATA 3.0 ports, though it is backwards compatible, so you do not have to take advantage. These allow for theoretical data transfer speeds of up to 6GB/s, as opposed to the 3GB/s of SATA 2.0. The Gigabyte GA-970a-D3P has 6 SATA 3.0 hard drive slots. ATX is the most common form factor, and as such has a high degree of compatibility with other components while providing a decent number of slots to widen your expansion options. It uses the DDR3 memory type, with maximum speeds of up to 1866 MHz, and 4 DDR3 slots allowing for a maximum total of 32 GB RAM.Ĭonforming to the ATX standard, the Gigabyte GA-970a-D3P should fit into the majority of cases. Any compatible AMD CPU will have the same socket entry. The Gigabyte GA-970a-D3P uses the AMD Socket AM3+ CPU socket.