Board Layout

     The board has almost everything located in the normal area.  The battery and the CMOS reset is located right above the first PCI slot.  Depending on what you have in that slot or the size of the heatsink on your video card, may require you to remove them to reset the BIOS.  Keep in mind that this is an entry level board.  So, while some of the bells and whistles may have been left off, everything you need is still here.

     The new Intel 965 Express chipset is featured on this board.  This supports the new Core 2 Duo processors from Intel as well as DDR2 with Intel fast memory access.

     Paired with the Intel 965 Express chipset is the new Intel ICH8 southbridge.  Intel has taken a bold step with the ICH8 and has banished IDE support.  I feel this is a bit premature since there are so many IDE devices still being sold.  SATA optical drives are difficult to come by and only a few manufacturers offer them.  Maybe Intel is hoping to push the manufacturers into offering more SATA devices and leaving IDE to go the way of the ISA slot.

     Don't fear though, you'll still get IDE support.  Gigabyte, like many other manufacturers, had to put their own controller chip on the board to support IDE.  Gigabyte uses their SATA 2 controller chip to support SATA RAID 0, 1, and JBOD as well as provide one IDE header.  So if you still have one or two IDE devices, you'll be alright.  If you have three or more, then you're out of luck.  The purple ports are controlled by the Gigabyte SATA controller and provide you with your RAID capabilities.  The yellow SATA ports are controlled by the ICH8 southbridge and provide no RAID function.

     Realtek gets the nod for all of the sound duties and does a pretty good job.  Using the Intel high definition audio the board provides very clear 8-channel audio.