Gigabyte AB350N-GAMING WiFi: An Ideal Mini-ITX Ryzen Motherboard For Linux

Aside from the cosmetic feature of not supporting the RGB Fusion / LED controls under Linux, there was just one practical issue encountered. When first trying to boot the Ubuntu 17.04 live USB installer, I was getting the "unexpected IRQ trap at vector 07" messages being continuously printed on the screen. This has been common to a number of different newer AMD Ryzen motherboards but is fortunately an easy workaround. To workaround this, simply boot Ubuntu with the "acpi=off" command-line argument. After doing so, Ubuntu could be installed successfully. After installation you can upgrade the Linux kernel and the problem will go away, short of disabling ACPI again.

With Ryzen anyhow I tend to recommend Linux 4.11~4.12 (or newer) for best support. Ubuntu 17.04 on Linux 4.12 was playing great with the Gigabyte AB320N-GAMING WiFi. I also installed the recently released Fedora 26 with its Linux 4.11 kernel: there were no IRQ errors at boot time and the system has been playing out just fine.

The Realtek ALC1220 works great with Linux 4.11+, the Realtek Gigabit Ethernet was working out of the box (not that there's been much of an issue there in years), the 802.11ac WiFi was working on both Ubuntu and Fedora with using an Intel 3165 chipset, and the Bluetooth was also functioning. Granted, in the few Ryzen motherboards I've checked out so far at Phoronix, they have all ended up working out fine on recent Linux kernel releases.

The motherboard also has basic sensors support working under Linux. If running LM_Sensor's sensors-detect, no sensors end up getting detected. However, if manually loading the IT8792 driver (modprobe it87), it ends up working and reporting three temperature sensors, three fan sensors, and various voltage inputs.

Most of my tests with this mini-ITX motherboard have been in conjunction with an AMD Ryzen 5 1400, NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 Corsair (and yes, the latest BIOS on this motherboard happily allows for the 3200MHz speed) and 512GB Intel 545s SSD to make for a nice compact Linux PC. Via the Phoronix Test Suite I have been running various benchmarks with this Gigabyte motherboard, which you can find via our results archive on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Overall, the AB350N-GAMING WiFi motherboard has been working out fine with my daily tests of the motherboard under Linux over the past month. This Ryzen motherboard retails for about $115 USD, which is a fairly good deal for those wanting to build a HTPC/gaming media center box or just looking for having a mini-ITX/SSF PC. The onboard WiFi and Bluetooth under Linux are nice touches as are the plenty of USB3 ports and all key functionality working under Linux. This motherboard is available from Internet retailers like Amazon and NewEgg for $114.99.