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Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £107
inc VAT

Specifications

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

http://www.microdirect.co.uk

Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-UD3R has some impressive overclocking features.

The BIOS lets you boost the frontside bus to a silly 1,200MHz and control the voltage of the processor, RAM and chipset. You can overclock your RAM to a maximum of 1,375MHz, and it has two BIOS chips, so you can boot up even if your BIOS settings on one are accidentally corrupted. At stock speeds, it was in the middle or near the bottom of our benchmarks.

The GA-EP45-UD3R also has plenty of expansion slots and ports. There are three PCI slots, although fitting a double-slot graphics card to the PCI Express x16 slot may block access to one of the three PCI Express x1 slots. It’s one of only three Intel motherboards here to have both optical and coaxial S/PDIF ports for connecting a surround-sound amplifier.

Like Asus’s P5Q Pro, it has eight SATA ports, which is more than enough for connecting multiple internal hard disks. These can also be used as eSATA ports, and a bracket is included in the box. With eight USB and two FireWire 400 ports, there’s no shortage of external connectors.

Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-UD3R is generously specified, and it’s the motherboard to buy if you need lots of expansion ports and slots. We were disappointed that it wasn’t faster in our benchmarks at its stock settings, though, and it’s expensive at just over £100 including VAT. Foxconn’s P43A is a better choice for most people.

Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor socket LGA775
Form factor ATX
Size 244x305mm
Processor support Celeron, Pentium Dual-core, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme Edition
Processor external bus 400MHz (1,600MHz quad-pumped FSB)
Chipset north bridge Intel P45 Express
Chipset south bridge Intel ICH10R
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics No
Supported memory type DDR2 667/800/1066/1366
Maximum memory speed PC2-11000
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 16GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £107
Supplier http://www.microdirect.co.uk
Details www.gigabyte.com.tw

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 1
Dual graphics architecture none
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 3
PCI slots 3
Fan headers 2
Floppy ports 1
IDE ports 1
Serial ATA ports 8
RAID chipset (max disks) Intel ICH10R (6x SATAII, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10), Gigabyte SATA2 (2x SATAII, RAID 0, 1, JBOD)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC889A (optical and coaxial S/PDIF, 6x analogue out)
USB2 ports / headers 8/4
Firewire ports / headers 2/1
Legacy ports 2x PS/2, parallel header, serial header
Other ports none
Cables included 2x SATA, 1x IDE, 1x floppy, 1x Molex to SATA power, 1x eSATA
Brackets included 1x eSATA
Software included Xpress Recovery 2

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 1,200MHz

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