Joined on 03/07/04
Good board, small problems
Pros: Low price, nice feature set, great for an office workstation.
Cons: 1. BIG FIRMWARE ISSUE! I have purchased 2 of these boards. The first one gave me no trouble, but on the second one, attempting to install microsoft office, or the video drivers from the included (XP) CD failed. After an entire day of troubleshooting (eliminating HD, CD as conflicts) I decided to try updating the BIOS. Current bios revision is F5 which is what was on the board, but the gagabyte @bios utility "downgraded" it to version F4. Now everything installs fine. 2. Form Factor. Gigabyte claims this is an ATX board, but it is less than 9" wide. It doesn't reach the standard 9 ATX standoffs. You can still get 7 standoffs under it, and it is fairly stable, so this is only a minor issue.
Overall Review: Board is good, just be aware of the small form, and be ready to downgrade the bios.
Vista not supported
Pros: Worked with XP as advertised running up to date software and firmware.
Cons: Did not work with Vista at all. Multiple hours on multiple days with Linksys support failed to resolve. Software would crash on launch on three vista machines (2 running home premium, 1 running business)
Overall Review: Newegg Customer support rocks! I was out of the normal return period, but they still allowed the RMA because of time spent working with Linksys.
Plotzed
Pros: Cheap
Cons: DOA. memtest86 ran a whole 4 seconds before declaring this chip a failure
Overall Review: Product received did not match image. Item I received had only 4 chips per side. I know some older systems (early P3 era) wont handle this format of chip.