Gigabyte MA78GM Motherboard

This motherboard supports both AM2 and AM2+ processors. It comes with

integrated ATI Radeon HD3200-based graphics. It features PCI-E 2.0 x16 interface

with ATI Hybrid CrossFireX support. The difference between the ATI Hybrid and

ATI CrossFireX is that the latter allows the system to run more than two

graphics processors at the same time but not the integrated graphics processor,

whereas the former allows the discrete and integrated graphics processor to work

at the same time.

For reviewing the motherboard we used Phenom X3 2.81 GHz processor, 2 GB DDR2

RAM and NVIDIA 9600GTX graphics card. In 3D Mark 06, the score ticked to 11,599

3D Marks while in PC Mark 05 it scored 7,595 PCMarks. The score for PC Mark as

compared to the relatively similar ECS G41T-M (V2.0) motherboard (4740 PCMarks;

reviewed in May 09), which costs Rs 5,200 is good. In UT3 benchmarking it gave

an average FPS of 92.42 and in CineBench, while rendering all CPUs it gave a

score of 7,009 CB-CPUs. Even compared to the ECS G43T-M motherboard which is

priced at Rs 5,140 (reviewed in December 2008) the performance is good. This

makes the motherboard a good performer for this price.

Bottomline: Considering the features it offers for the price, it is a

decent buy.