Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 Motherboard

Thursday, June 15th, 2006 | Motherboards, News

The AM2 chipset which will be utilized by new AMD chips has seen quite a boost in popularity with at least a few motherboard manufacturers getting in on the action and making motherboards to suit. As for chipsets, well nVidia is still the maker of choice, being a close supporter of AMD.

The AM2 socket has 940 pins, but should not be confused with the 940 pin chips that AMD had a little while back, these have a different setup for the pins under the processor itself.

Besides the obvious support of AM2 processors, this board has quiet a few other features. It can suppot up to 8GB or DDR2 RAM. There are 2 PCIe slots, but they only work at 8x, meaning they are slightly slower than cards running on the more expensive chipset. The usual floppy drive connectors and hard drive connectors are in place, but there are also two sets of 3 SATA connectors.

High Definition Audio is the new standard in onboard audio and allows for much better quality from sound cards that are built into the motherboard.

In the full test at motherboards.org, they found the board to be a little slower that the ASUS board that they had for comparisson. The board itself is aimed at the mid-range. The nForce 570 SLI chipset is not as high-performance as its 590 counterpart, which is aimed at the enthusiast.

computer-reviews.net

Computer News and Reviews