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Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR LGA775 motherboard review

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR LGA775 motherboard
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £106
inc VAT

Gigabyte's GA-EP45T-UD3LR is a well-equipped, but expensive LGA775 motherboard.

Specifications

LGA775, ATX, Intel P45 chipset, supports: Celeron Dual Core, Pentium Dual Core, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme

http://www.amazon.co.uk

Gigabyte’s GA-EP45T-UD3LR is a full-size ATX motherboard, so it has plenty of ports and slots. It can accommodate up to 16GB of DDR3 memory thanks to its four RAM slots. Few people will want this much, if only because 4GB modules are currently exorbitantly expensive.

There’s no shortage of ports for connecting storage devices. There are six SATA ports and the built-in RAID controller allows you to create a RAID 0,1, 5 or 10 array. There are eight USB ports and four USB headers that can be turned into ports using backplates, so you could connect up to 12 USB peripherals in total without resorting to hubs.

PCI Express x1 peripherals aren’t particularly common compared to their PCI counterparts, so most motherboards have more PCI slots than PCI Express x1 slots. The GA-EP45T-UD3LR reverses this trend and has four PCI Express x1 slots and just two PCI slots. The graphics card slot is squeezed in between the RAM slots and the Southbridge chip, so fitting a particularly chunky graphics card could be troublesome.

The GA-EP45T-UD3LR has a frontside bus speed of 400MHz quad pumped to 1,600MHz. None of the LGA775 processors still widely available use this external bus speed though, so this isn’t an advantage over other motherboards which have a slower effective frontside bus speed of 1,333MHz.

Gigabyte’s GA-EP45T-UD3LR has plenty of slots and ports, but at £106, it’s expensive for a LGA775 motherboard. If you have this much money to spend, you’re better off building a new PC around an LGA1156 board which will cost less and have more future upgrade potential.

Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor socket LGA775
Form factor ATX
Size 305x210mm
Processor support Celeron Dual Core, Pentium Dual Core, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme
Processor external bus 400MHz (1,600MHz quad-pumped FSB)
Chipset north bridge Intel P45
Chipset south bridge Intel ICH10R
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics No
Supported memory type DDR3 800/1066/1333/2200
Maximum memory speed PC3-17600
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 16GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £106
Supplier http://www.amazon.co.uk
Details www.gigabyte.com.tw

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 4-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 1
Dual graphics architecture none
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 4
PCI slots 2
Fan headers 3
Floppy ports 1
IDE ports 1
Serial ATA ports 6
RAID chipset (max disks) Intel ICH10R (6x SATAII, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC888 (optical and coaxial S/PDIF, 6x analogue out)
USB2 ports / headers 8/4
Firewire ports / headers 0/0
Legacy ports 2x PS/2
Other ports none
Cables included 2x SATA, 1x IDE
Brackets included none
Software included none

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 500MHz

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