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Meant for moderate gamers, this board from Gigabyte is
built on Intel's 945G Express chipset, and supports Intel's latest Pentium D
dual core processor. It has LGA 775 socket and supports 1066 MHz front side bus.
The motherboard has 4 DIMM memory slots that can take up to 4 GB of dual channel
DDR II 667 MHz RAM. It's also 64-bit ready, supporting Intel's Extended
Memory 64 Technology. The onboard videos are based on Intel's Graphics Media
Accelerator 950, which gave pretty good graphics performance. Other features
include 4 SATA II and a single PATA connector but we wished it had two. The
board also has a PCI-E X16 slot for adding a better graphics card, one PCIE X1
and two PCI slots. It also has a Gigabit Ethernet port, three FireWire and eight
USB 2.0 ports. The board also supports 8-channels audio.
Besides hardware, the board also has an Intelligent Tweaker,
CPU Intelligent Accelerator, Memory Intelligent Booster, System Overclock Saver,
Download
Center
and Corporate Online Management (see the other Gigabyte board review for
details on these). The board also has Easy Tune 5, a useful Windows-based
utility to allow full hardware monitoring and control by easy overclocking and
regulation. Norton Internet Security Suite 05 is also bundled along.
We used the same tests and test bed as used in the Gigabyte
8I915ME board. It scored 34.3 and 52.9 in the Business and Multimedia Content
Creation Winstone respectively. Though the board had lower BW and MCCW scores,
it outperformed in 3D Mark with a score of 468, and in Doom3 with 7.4 fps at
1024x768 resolution and 32 bit color depth. We also tested the board with
an nVidia 7800GT high-end graphics card, which obviously shot the scores to 6410
and 62.7 fps respectively. The 3D Mark score with this graphics card was the
highest as compared to that in our October motherboard shootout.
Bottom Line: A good future proof board for moderate
gamers at a decent price tag.
Anubhav Verma