Gigabyte Motherboard GA-81845GV-C

This board is based on Intel 845GV chipset with socket 478 for Intel P4 processors and has 533/400 MHz FSB and supports DDR333/266 DDR RAM up to a maximum of 2GB. It features on-board Intel graphics, Realtek AC'97 Audio codec and hyper threading technology. It has 3 PCI slots, LAN, four USB2.0 ports and one internal SPDIF output connector. We tested it with a P4 2.2 GHz, 256 MB DDR running at 266 MHz, 7200RPM HDD and compared it with Asus P4BGL-MX motherboard (page 109, PCQuest, October 2003). This board performed better than the Asus in 3DMark 2001SE and Quake III Arena, which are gaming tests. It performed extremely well in Quake III Arena considering the fact that it is tested with onboard graphics. In business productivity and content creation tests it could not win but the scores are decent enough to run the apps smoothly. You can check out the comparative scores in the table below. At Rs 3,150 it is a good buy especially for gaming enthusiasts looking for economical solution. It also comes with software that includes Norton Internet Security 2003.

Siddharth Sharma