[LYL]Homer
Supreme [H]ardness
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Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H G45 mATX
- Thread starter [LYL]Homer
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King of Heroes
[H]ard|Gawd
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All these new P45-based mATX boards coming out are really awesome. Then you have VIA's new mini-ITX 2.0 spec as well. Really, really good time for small form factor without any comprising for performance.
Vengance_01
Supreme [H]ardness
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Nice. To bad I just bought the Asus G35 board
This board had a picture on my.ocworkbench.com a while ago. The concerning thing was that it quoted the PCIe slot as being only x4 electrically. I can't really see why gigabyte would cripple the board in that fashion so I'm hoping that information was in error.
That said looking closely at the picture the PCIe slot does seem to be much lighter in color in the last 2/3'rds.
That said looking closely at the picture the PCIe slot does seem to be much lighter in color in the last 2/3'rds.
It's no error, if you look closely at that picture you can see the slot is also labeled PCIEX4.
The annoying part is that otherwise it would be an ideal board if only because it'll have some sort of Live DD/DTS encoding over SPDIF, plus it has a nice set of backpanel ports. Still 4x PCIe 2.0 is equivalent to 8x PCIe 1.0 bandwidth.. so it shouldn't be a total deal breaker, although it'll definitely make a lot of people who want to use a discrete graphics card go for the DFI boards.
As to why they did it, i have a suspicion it's because they wanted to go the easy way with wiring it up. Since the DVI/HDMI ports have to be implemented through the same pins as the PCIe 16x port, they probally didn't want to bother putting the hardware in to switch the lanes over. So they only wired in the unused lanes to the PCIe slot.
Toaster Oven
Limp Gawd
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- 342
It's a shame Gigabyte never did anything about that PCI-E 16x slot. That would have made this a nice budget alternative to the DFI mATX. Comparing them the DFI unit has dual PCI-E 16x slots, better layout for connectors, heatpiped northbridge cooler + passive cooler for mosfets, 8 pin CPU connector, and most likely a better BIOS. I'm all for saving money but the GA-EG45M-DS2H would have to be a helluva lot cheaper to make me consider it over the DFI at this point
Werent one of the G33 Gigabyte boards also crippled with either a PCIE 4x or 8x slot? Its been a few months but I believe they released 2 or 3 different G33 boards and only the cheapest one had this issue. For people looking to build a low power consumption HTPC with no GPU, this should not be an issue.
Well, Gigabyte had three G33 mATX models, and one G33 ATX model, so that gave you plenty to choose from. The other two/three models were just fine, and so were the rest of G33-based mobos (except for that odd blocked open-ended 4x slot on the P5K-VM, of course
...)If this board is the only one G45-based (and from the looks of it, it seems like it, unless we'll finally see a the "DS3R" or "DS4R" model number on a mATX board from Gigabyte...), then either Gigabyte is saying "S**** you, mATX gaming adepts", or they haven't even considered the gaming market (not really news here, we all know how crippled the DSR2 G33-based board was because of the poor BIOS - and even then, it kicked may ATX boards' a***s... hehe), making this board only HTPC-friendly. Not that bad, but if they wanted to go that way, they could just go mini-ITX or DTX without the long PCI-E slot (just a short 4x one).
Eh, we'll see in a month. I just hope Foxxconn or Asus cough up something nice. Like an anorectic (on price only) P5E-VM HDMI on steroids (full PS/2 support IN, PLEASE!): black PCB, 4 DDR2 slots (or, better yet, 4DDR2+2DDR3), PCI-E 16x (full speed) + open-ended PCI-E 4x slot, ICH10R, 1 eSATA port, IEEE1394 (not really a Mac fan
; preferably on the PCI bus - you'll see why in a bit), Intel Gigabit LAN (Intel NICs are great - low CPU usage and great speeds; besides, the southbridge has space for it...), Realtek ALC1000 (hey, since we're living large... lol; I haven't heard of any boards using it, though), and a PCI-E IDE+eSATA controller, with proper AHCI and IDE mode separation (remember the P5B Deluxe? That IS hell on Earth).Ok, I'll stop drooling now... lol If anyone has any more info on G45-based mobos, do tell.
Cheers.
Miguel
I haven't seen mention of any non-crippled gigabyte mATX motherboards. This is disappointing since the G33M-DS2R has provided excellent service in the system I made with it. Given I'm making a gaming / SFF pc they've effectively removed themselves as an option if this is all they have.
The competition seems to be between the Asus P5Q-EM HDMI (G45) and of course the DFI LP JR P45-T2RS (P45, Crossfire) at to the best gaming mATX.
The competition seems to be between the Asus P5Q-EM HDMI (G45) and of course the DFI LP JR P45-T2RS (P45, Crossfire) at to the best gaming mATX.