GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2 LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7100/nForce 630i Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Has everything for a basic setup and supports older equipment(i.e. has a printer port and a serial port) Supports just about any Intel (775) processor. NVIDIA 7100 works great in Ubuntu 8.10 ;)

Cons: none so far

Other Thoughts: Followed the advice of another reviewer and installed the processor before putting the board in the case! Thanks, I could see why right away! It'll save you some time and you'll still have skin on your knuckles.

Pros: all the components work. i didn't use any of the mobo options for overclocking, so i can't comment about that.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: built this for someone else, so i didn't play around with it. used it with e5200

Pros: Nice simple board for the normal home computer. Easy to configure and well laid out.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: Onboard graphics are more than adequate for normal home use.

Pros: Great value

Cons: NVIDIA doesn't have any RAID drivers compatible with Windows Home Server. Their tech support was very lacking. Took more than a week to get a "we can't help you" response.

Pros: On Board Raid, Video is decent but if you're gonna game, get a card. I dropped in a E7200, posted and off I went with the Windows Install. Nice Small Design. Bios has decent amount of options for Overclocking including FSB, Memory adjustment (sorry, no timings) and more. Lots of Goodies for the Price.

Cons: Like many Micro Atx Boards I've seen, the Sata ports are just located in a cumbersome area. I put a 8800gt in this build and like many ppl, went with the L bracket sata cables. It's still a pretty tight fit. Sometimes If I take this Machine too a LAN party, the GPU comes loose out of the PCI-E16 spot (I now realize this after a couple of times of not having Video). I Just push on the card and it works fine. I'm sure that can't be good for the X16 slot. :P

Other Thoughts: Overall, this is a great board with the exception of the Sata ports. Gigabyte, IMO, is kinda hit and miss with they're mobos. I've had good luck and some bad luck. I bought it originally for a recording rig, but it ended up being my secondary gaming rig. Good baord, once again
E7200 @3.19 ghz
4 gigs DDr 800 @ 900 mhz
8800gt @ 700mhz
2 x 320gb hdd's in Raid 0
GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2
HEC case w/585 watt psu

Pros: The board is small size which is perfect for mini case at first. Dual VGA and DVI out for Dual Monitor. CPU over clocking makes easy from BIOS. It has Nvidia ethernet controller built in which I see no problem so far - works great. 4 SATA ports and 1 ATA ports.

Cons: Materials supplied like SATA cables, ATA cables, power cables are very rough. Looks great in picture but once you touch them, you will feel they are cheaply designed/made. One problem which gave me right away was, 3 SATA ports standing so close in vertical position. If you have all 3 SATA cable connected and you want to take out one at the bottom, you have to take out 2 from the top first (in this case I am talking about when you use the SATA cable they supplied, it has lock at the connector). VGA, and DVI port seems too close to each other. I am not sure it may cause connection difficulty when you are using both ports.

Other Thoughts: Overall!. Yes, it's a fast motherboard. Bus speed running at 800MHz and supports up to Core 2 Duo CPUs. Well, if you want cheap and good motherboard, you might want to try this one.

Pros: Small, inexpensive, decent IGP graphics, Vista gives a windows experience score of 3.8 for graphics, 3.0 for gaming graphics. It runs Areo just fine. RAID 5 seems to work well. I am running it right now with 3 160Gb drives; I bought 2 of these for test systems and have been playing around with some different configs. I have loaded windows 2003, XP, Vista all with no issues. I had to use some XP drivers on windows 2003. 64 bit versions work as well, plus you get support for greater then 4 GB of memory, if you need that much... but you will need a different board...

Cons: The IGP wasn't up to par for Company of Heroes except on the lowest settings, and I was still getting warning messages playing online that my settings were to high and lagging the game... but adding a graphics card fixed that.

Other Thoughts: SATA ports could be an issue with a longer graphics card. I put an ATI 1650 pro in and it is a snug fit against the one SATA port cable. I am using the E1200 1.6 GHz processors in both of mine. They run very cool. The QPack case I am using has good air flow, which probably helps.

Pros: Sorry I forgot to post my nickname below. But I think it may be of interest since I've written reviews related to this elsewhere.

Cons: I really might have considered a different board for what I'm doing. This is basically a portable server, complete with two Samsung 1TB F1's in a RAID1 array. 8GBs of memory in two DIMM slots would have suited me better than this board's measly 4GB. But for an Intel solution, I think this was still the best I could do.

Other Thoughts: If you have a very small machine, with little room (less than 8 inches depth) for a motherboard (Flex-ATX), you'll find that this is the one to get. The original Mattel Barbie computer I'm using only had a 150W power supply, but is sufficient to run a 65W processor and RAID1. So you can go as high as an E3110 Xeon, and still have enough power to run it in something this small. Only if you're running a Linux like I am, where there are no constraints upon maximum memory, might you then want to consider a different board which allows for 8GBs of ram. There's only one board that allows that, and unfortunately, it isn't an Intel system. It does however use a Nvidia 8100, if that matters to you.

Pros: This board was one of the few that I could find small enough to fit in an old Mattel Barbie computer. The chassis has NO expansion slots, so everything I wanted, had to be on the board. I choose this board for the HDMI and Gigabit LAN. I've not been disappointed. I'm using this with an Intel E1200, now running at 2.0GHz (250x8). I also have my ram running at 900MHz. That's a performance gain of 25/12.5% respectively. I'm now considering purchasing the Xeon 3GHz E3110 to replace my present cpu. My temperatures haven't risen at all. I expect the same from the new processor, except running at 4GHz!!

Cons: Initially the setup didn't run. It would boot into Slackware Linux (just past the lilo prompt), reporting that the BIOS check was successful, and then immediately shutdown. Turns out the voltage on the board was set too high. Since this is my first time building a new Intel system, I didn't expect this kind of behavior. Typically, I ran nothing but AMD. Recently, Opterons, but before, Athlons.

Changing the voltage to 1.0v got the system to boot completely. I now have it bumped up to a mere 1.0125v to keep the system stable.

My only real complaint, is that this chipset apparently won't support 8GBs of memory. That's an issue for me running Linux, since even 32bit will handle that. Otherwise, I would have used these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231182

Other Thoughts: Based on my experience with this build, I think I'll be using Intel for a long time to come. The only thing that would possibly change that, would be AMD releasing Barcelonas with two quad-cores on one chip, following Intel's lead using two dual-cores on one chip. That alone is what would save the massive bleeding of AMD's customer base running over to Intel. But then again, Intel would more likely do that than AMD.

All of this is kind of funny. I wouldn't have even considered doing all of this, were it not for a close friend giving me that Barbie computer. I was going to throw it out, just as he was. That's until I decided to paint it black. Now she's most beautiful babe on the block! Barbie in black leather. WOW!!!

Pros: This was my first ever computer build. I wanted a board with built in video that was cheap but dependable. This one was so easy to install and set up. Didn't need to update the bios, it recognized everything with minimal fuss. I've run the system for a month now. The onboard video has been good enough to run WOW and HalfLife 2 and other games with no problems. I'm a new Gigabyte customer, and I'll buy again.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I'm running one SATA hard drive and also my old IDE hard drive. I was afraid that the IDE drive wouldn't work right, but it does. I also have SATA CD and DVD Combo drives that work great. I have a dual core Wolfdale processor with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 and run below 40 degrees at all times.