Review on 🎮 Gigabyte A520M DS3H Gaming Motherboard with AMD Ryzen AM4, MicroATX, 5+3 Phases Digital PWM, Gaming GbE LAN, NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2, Triple Display Interfaces, Q-Flash Plus, RGB Fusion 2.0 by Alonzo Wilkins

Wanted to like it, really liked it. There's a lot of good in that. Unfortunately, I've had endless problems with the Ryzen 5 3400G APUs. Everything worked fine for normal, "casual" operations, but as soon as I did something graphically intensive, like playing video games like Victor Vran or Pillars of Eternity, everything went wrong. Specifically, I got the "AMD Black Screen of Death" where my monitor and all peripherals shut down and I couldn't even restart my computer while holding the power button. I would run any of these games within 30 seconds anytime. Boom. black screen of death. I tried various changes to fix the problem. I updated the bios, swapped PSU, RAM, hard drives, operating systems and finally. CPU. When I replaced the 3400G with my son's older Ryzen 3 2200G, everything ran like clockwork, even the video games mentioned. So I thought I had a defective processor and RMAd Ryzen 5 3400G. A week later I received a replacement APU, plugged it into the AM4 slot and. Same issue: Black Screen of Death every time I launch a graphically intensive game. In desperation, I was willing to send my 3400G in for a refund until I decided on a whim to swap out the processors for my son's computer. As before, connecting his 2200G to this motherboard worked fine and. Connecting my 3400G to its Gigabyte B450M D3SH also worked flawlessly. There are no problems at all, even with exactly the same games. So I have to conclude that there is a functionality issue somewhere between this Gigabyte A520M and the Ryzen 5 3400G as the older 2200G works fine while the 3400G also works fine on the (old) B450M D3Sh board. If you want to use 3400G, choose an older chipset. Just make sure you update your BIOS to the latest version as it may not support 3400G by default. In the end I keep my fee. My son got lucky when he got a processor upgrade. I'll still be sticking with the 2200G and won't upgrade as long as I have this motherboard.