Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS5 Motherboard

The latest S- series motherboards from Gigabyte has all the features of

other P45 series motherboards, with the added features of a new TPM chip for

security. The built-in chip provides 2048bits encryption.

They call it Ultra Secure. The P45 Express Chipset based board has DDR2 DIMM

sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory. Gigabyte's DS3 and DS4 have 3

PCI slots while DS5 has 2 PCI slots (2x16) and up to 12 USB 2.0 ports.

Motherboard was tested with 120 GB SATA 7200rpm HDD Intel Quad Core 2.66 GHz

Processor, 2 GB DDR2 600 MHz RAM and XP SP2 .

The score for BW was 37.5, which is pretty good while Performance vs Speed

scores for Sisoft Sandra were 67 and 95 ns/MHz. The scores for 3D Mark, PC Mark

and Pov-Ray benchmarks were 10460, 7317 and 53705 respectively. 1CPU-2182 and

xCPU-7728 were the Cinebench 10 scores. Using NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT, the scores

obtained for Gaming performance of UT3, Crysis and Company of Heroes were 60

fps, 35 fps and 103 fps respectively.

In comparison to Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R, which we reviewed in July '08, this

board performed much better. However, it doesn't have support for DDR3.

Bottomline : Given the performance and feature like TMP chip and P45

chipset, it's a good buy. However, it's a bit expensive.