Customer Reviews:
 Excellent for HTPC September 19, 2008
Fremio Brea (Miami, Florida United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Best MB for gaming and movies on the market at a price you can pay!
Great energy efficient board October 10, 2008
Kraziken (Kent, Wa United States)
I was using an older Pentium 4 system for my Media center, and was looking for something with more power and efficiency.
I paired this motherboard with an AMD 4850e processor, which only requires 45 watts.
This runs quiet and and the onboard video has enough power to run my HD-DVD and Blu-ray titles. I haven't tried gaming since it is a dedicated HTPC and sits by my TV. I have a seperate computer for games.
When purchasing this board, make sure you look for the 1.1 revision. Gigabyte has revised the Northbridge heatsink. The one pictured here is flat, while the new Bridge is shaped different and has a taller heatsink. The Northbridge gets very hot to the touch on the older heatsink.
Another word of Caution, if you decide to run Vista media center, you may want to stick to 32-bit. My hauppauge tv tuner occasionally glitches. Each new revision of the sound driver seems to improve things. They've had several new drivers in the last month or two so they seem to be actively working to resolve issues. My friend's 32-bit Vista machine has ran fine, while my setup (which is the same hardware wise) in 64-bit has had some performance hiccups that I'm living with for now.
Otherwise, great board, great features and at a great price. Also check out the newer revised version of this board, the GA-MA78GPM-DS2H. The model names are different, chipset is revised and has 128MB of sideport memory dediated for video. The cost difference is only $5 from my local store.
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