GIGABYTE GA-M78SM-S2H AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

Reviewed By: on 12/20/2008

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 month to 1 year

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Low power. HDMI Audio. Linux compatibility. VDPAU hardware video acceleration.

Cons: Had to update the version of alsa so that hdmi audio would work

Other Thoughts: With Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and an updated alsa, everything is working great.

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Low Budget, Easy Install, Great Motherboard!

Reviewed By: Malc7397 on 12/8/2008

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: This Board was so easy to install, It doesn't matter if you are using xp home or pro, or even windows vista. Just make sure you do a fresh install. You will have no problems if you know what you are doing. I paired this board with OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Brisbane 2.7GHz and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive and to power this unit I have an A-Power Pure Black 580W 20+4-pin ATX PSU w/SATA. This is my personal system for business.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I also built another computer using this same Gigabyte board for one of my clients. She is so excited and loves the way her new pc performs! I usually use MSI, But they have done me dirty in the past. One of their boards out of the many that I bought caught fire and they only wanted to replace the board, not the whole system. I wanted to try something different, and Gigabyte has earned my respect!

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If you are believing all these bad reviews read this

Reviewed By: on 11/22/2008

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 day to 1 week

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Tons of pros here. The on board video when using 800mhz ddr2 ram is blazing and only sucks 12 watts of energy. The hybrid VLSI is amazing for both power usage and speed. I'm really glad I thoroughly researched it on the NVIDIA website before I decided to go back to AMD.

Cons: Gigabyte tends to run a little fussy on their boards with timing so I haven't done alot of clockwork with it yet but I bought Gigabyte because this is what I'm running for a very long time and everyone else is similar in value to them but none of them have gigabytes wear like iron don't break proven to me durability.

Other Thoughts: Some of the people here aren't very good with computers. If you get blue screen just trying to swap this board for an existing 32 bit system you have to do windows repair installation or reload from scratch because it's going to need to do thing differently with ram addressing. If you have problems with the ethernet you have to turn modem off power up system and make sure the system is powered the first time before turning your modem back on or else it won't communicate. You have to do this with most newer ethernet chips. Once it's all going you don't have to worry about it but if you try to go back to using cable modem with an older ethernet you have to follow the power down the modem procedure to get it to work. I paired this with a duel core 4850e and 2 geil 2mb ddr2-800's. Runs 31 to 36 degrees c with OEM cooling and single 120mm fan blowing from side of case on cpu/gpu. The gpu/northbridge is 1 inch from cpu. So might be flaky with 135 quad core radiating 60 c heat all over it

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