Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-S2H review

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Verdict:

This budget motherboard has on-board graphics and an HDMI output, but its below-average performance means we can't recommend it.

Review Date: 21 Sep 2009

Price when reviewed: £54

Supplier: http://www.scan.co.uk

Reviewed By: Alan Lu & Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Gigabyte's GA-EG41MF-S2H is a low-cost LGA775 microATX board.

Its four memory slot can can take up to 8GB of RAM, and it has the usual IDE and floppy drive connectors, but only four SATA ports, two of which were blocked when we connected a double-height graphics card. However, a standard graphics card left plenty of room to connect both a PCI-E x1 card in the slot above and a PCI card in the slot below. The on-board Intel GMA X4500HD graphics processor can handle HD video but not games. Its HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs, make it suitable for a media centre PC.

There are only four USB ports on the rear I/O panel, along with one FireWire port. Two spare USB headers can be connected to another two ports each, for a total of eight. There's also an additional FireWire header, but no eSATA port. The board has a pair of PS/2 connectors, which are useful given the limited number of USB ports. There's also a serial port header for the unlikely chance that you'll ever need one.

On-board audio is provided by a Realtek ALC888 processor, which can output up to 7.1 analogue audio or digital audio via an optical S/PDIF output. The analogue ports can also be reassigned in the Realtek driver, so you can plug any audio device (input or output) into any port and configure it in software.

While some budget LGA775 motherboards exceeded our expectations in our tests, this one didn't. Its overall score of 87 isn't awful, but we prefer Asus's P5QL, which costs the same but has better performance.

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