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Gigabyte GA-8I915ME-G Motherboard 

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PCQ Bureau
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Gigabyte GA-8I915ME-G Motherboard

 
Price:

Rs 4,050 (3-yrs warranty)
Key Specs:

915 chipset, PCIE & AGP slots 
Contact:

Gigabyte Technologies, Mumbai. Tel: 30616666. E-mail: gigabytesales@gigabyte.in 



RQS# E57 or SMS 131257 to 9811800601

This economical motherboard is meant for general home and

office use and has good performance and features. It's built on Intel 915G

chipset, and has a socket 775 for P4. The board supports 800/533 MHz FSB, has

two DIMM slots that can take up to 2 GB DDR 400 RAM. The board has both onboard

graphics as well as a PCI-E X16 slot. There are two PCI slots and an AGP 8X

slot. It has two SATA connectors and strangely only one PATA connector. Though

PATA hard drives are becoming obsolete, optical drives still have not shifted to

SATA. It would have been nice if it had two PATA connectors.

It also has six USB ports-four  fixed towards the

rear and two in the front of the cabinet. The board even supports Gigabit LAN

and 6-Channel audio. It also has a feature called System Overclock Saver to

prevent system instability if you do overclocking;  the Motherboard

Intelligent Tweaker, CPU Intelligent Accelerator and Memory Intelligent Booster

applications. To build an office desktop, it has a good feature called Corporate

Online Management to allow MIS engineers to monitor and control the system via

the Internet. The motherboard even has an Xpress Recovery feature that can

backup the BIOS for better protection. Plus, the board also bundles Norton

Internet Security Suite 2005. We tested the board using BW 2002 for basic

productivity apps, MCCW 2003 for high-end multimedia creation apps, 3DMark 2005

for graphics and Doom3 for gaming. For tests, we used a P4 3.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR 400

RAM and a 7,200 rpm IDE drive. The board scored 36.1 in BW and a good 60.2 in

MCCW tests. The low 3DMark score of 205 is understandable because its onboard

graphics is only meant for basic productivity. The 54.2 fps it gave in Doom3 is

good for occasional and lightweight gaming.

Bottom Line: The board is ideal for homes or office

desktops given its low cost, features, and performance. Plus, its backward

compatibility of an AGP slot also adds to its value.

Anubhav Verma

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