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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.
