Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3P Motherboard

Price: ~$170 (price is fluctuating constantly (I bought it for $155))



Pros:
- Great Value for Money
- Heaps of Features
- On board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons
- Energy Saver
- Easy overclocking
- Well Made
- Plenty of I/O ports

Cons:
- Only has 8x second PCI-E slot
- Only has one PCI slot
- Northbridge heatsink is quite large (hard to fit third party CPU coolers)

In the box:

- Motherboard
- Manual
- Drivers CD
- Cables (IDE, Floppy, 4 SATA cables, eSATA bracket)
- Cool Stickers

Features
Gigabyte has a good reputation for motherboards and packing them with features. This motherboard is no exception. It is a mid range motherboard which supports Crossfire (8x), It has 8 USB ports, Firewire, IDE, Support for DDR2-1200, 6x SATA ports, In built energy saver and Ultra Durable 2 - comes with solid state capacitors and silent cooling and ferrite core chokes etc.

Performance:
Personally, I really liked this motherboard because it has a lot of features and fit well into my budget. I have plenty of room for expansion and the motherboard stays nice and cool. I also found it very easy to overclock with this motherboard. It has plenty of timing controls and voltage controls in the BIOS along with EasyTune 6 which makes these optins available in windows (personally I don't use it though). The motherboard also comes with plenty of energy saving features. I found this kept my CPU temperature to a minimum (around 40-45 degrees under load. Despite this, it never felt like the CPU wasn't getting enough power. This is one aspect which Gigabyte has done well in.

A few problems with this motherboard was the massive northbridge heatsink. i was going to put a third party cooler on the CPU but it was difficult to find one which fit. I eventually just stuck with the stock cooler. Another limitation of the board is that it has only one PCI slot. It is understandable that PCI-E slots are coming in but they are still rare and expensive.

Conclusion:
Despite these problems, I think Gigabyte have made a good all round motherboard which is perfect for basically anyone. The price is just right and it has all the features you could possibly want in a motherboard.

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