Motherboards

Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2H released


A small form factor targeted motherboard.

Since I'm into small PCs nowadays, this board grabbed my attention. It features the lower end Intel G41 chipset but still features a good array of I/O ports, among which the useful DVI-D and HDMI ports. The lack of hardware video decoding by the chipset doesn't make this motherboard a first HTPC choice but the smaller form factor does help and a 65W dual core will provide enough performance to decode every stream you throw at it, while giving little hassle with software.

All around it's a motherboard with the quality that Gigabyte has gotten us used to, targeted at a lower price point and with the unusual small motherboard footprint. There's still a three phase CPU power supply, which may prove too little for Core 2 Quads but more than enough for Core 2 Duos and Pentium processors.

As promised earlier, even this motherboard supports Gigabyte's DualBIOS, FSB is supported from 800MHz to 1333MHz and there's a PCI-e x16 slot. Be warned though, as to provide dual digital video outputs, the board can only provide 4 PCI-e lanes on the x16 slot. This will still be enough for mainstream graphics cards but don't expect it to deal with a GTX 285 in a spectacular way.


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