Directory  Reviews Motherboard Reviews |
| Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 Review |
|
|
|
Page 3 of 7 What You Get As we said earlier, this is a fairly basic board, and it shows in the packaging. The board ships in the standard lidded cardboard box we all know and love.
Looking at the actual board itself, there's little to disappoint for such a basic offering. Size wise, it's actually a little smaller than many boards you see today, which should make fitting it in narrower cases easier. All of the usual I/O and power headers are located around the perimeter of the board well out of the way of the rest of the components. Although the board itself is populated mostly with electrolytic capacitors, it is nice to see that around the socket area Gigabyte wisely uses low profile solid state capacitors, to better facilitate heatsink installation. The board has 4 DDR-2 DIMM slots, which support a maximum of 4GB of ram, and these are nicely color coded so you intuitively know how to install memory pairs for dual channel support. The bottom latches are somewhat close to a normal length PCI-E video card, but not to the point where it's impossible to add or remove memory with a card installed.
The northbridge is passively cooled, though with a rather large anodized heatsink. The southbridge, which is the standard ICH8 southbridge (i.e. No RAID) is likewise passively cooled, though with a smaller heatsink. Slot-wise, it's fairly standard here with 3 PCI-E 1x slots, 1 PCI-E 16x slot (sorry dual card lovers, you're out of luck here), and 3 PCI slots.
In the lower right corner of the board, you find 6 SATA connectors, and one IDE connector. Four of the SATA connectors are provided functionally off of the ICH8 southbridge, while the other two and the IDE channel are furnished by a conspicuously labeled “Gigabyte SATA2” chip. This is merely a licensed chip manufactured by JMicron, and in a few variants found on most all current P965 boards (due to the P965 chipset's lack of IDE). Onboard audio is provided by Realtek's HD Audio software, and is interfaced via the Realtek ALC883 chip, which supports 8 channel audio and SPDIF digital output. Onboard Gigabit Ethernet is provided by a Marvell 8056 Gigabit LAN Controller. Also present are 3 internal USB headers, and a header block for front panel audio.
Even with Gigabit Ethernet, 8 channel HD audio, and tons of USB headers, this is still a fairly basic offering here, as this sort of feature set is pretty much ubiquitous these days. From a layout standpoint there are no real issues or “gotcha's” for a builder to be concerned about, and this is a good thing.
Now that we've thoroughly dissected this board visually, let's proceed to the next phase and actually build a system. |
|||||||||
