GIGABYTE GA-G33M-S2L LGA 775 Intel G33 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: This board performs very well. I haven't bothered benchmarking it for comparisons, but it handles my Q6600 and Corsair PC2-6400 ram at 5-5-5-12 just fine, without any bios update. Had to use CTRL-F1 on bios main screen to manually set the ram timing properly. No big deal. The Realtek HD Audio is excellent, it's rich and warm. Huge improvement over my original Audigy, which I no longer use. I'll be adding the XFX 8800GT 512meg card sometime in the next few months. Until then, the onboard video will do.

6 rear USB ports, plus 3 headers for 12 USB ports total
Gigabit ethernet
Flawless legacy IDE(PATA)/floppy support, no conflicts with SATA
SPDIF and front panel audio headers

Cons: Only 2 fan headers, but I knew that before I bought it.
All of the capacitors are electrolitic, except the ones around the CPU socket, those are solid state.

Intel GMA3100 onboard video isn't the best. It supports Pixel Shader 3.0, according to Intel, but games that require it only detect PS 2.0 and many games simply don't support GMA3100 at all, so they won't run. Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Crysis and Bioshock won't run at all. GMA3100 is capable of running all 3 games, but the games simply don't support the chipset, so they won't run. Hellgate London runs decent though.

Overall Review: Solid board, even if you want to overclock a bit, which I don't do. Good feature set for a mATX board. Good price.

If it weren't for the lack of game support for the GMA3100 video, I would have rated this product a 5.

This is my first Gigabyte product, and I love it.

Pros: Excellent quality components around CPU area. Decent quality OC options for what is basically a budget board.

It has the usual handy Gigabyte features such as XpressRecovery (basically a hard drive imaging program residing in BIOS and HD) and QFlash which are very handy.

Cons: I still have no idea why Gigabyte hides overclocking options behind a cntl-F1 key in the BIOS menus. Gigabyte has also typically been sparse with fan headers - this board has only 2 (one for CPU and one for other use). This board also flexes more than most boards that I have worked with, including other budget boards and Gigabyte boards - I highly recommend installing the heatsink before mounting the motherboard (always a good idea, but especially so with this board).

My board was working very well for 3 weeks. Then, data corruption, BSOD, lock-ups, and boot looping started occurring. Swapping out memory, CPU, and powersupply with known-good components and reinstalling O/S resulted in no improvement.

Overall Review: Kudos to Newegg for a painless RMA. I have had good luck with Gigabyte in the past, so hopefully this is a stroke of bad luck. I will follow up after I live with my replacement for a while.

System: Intel Q6600, Crucial Ballistix pc2-8500, Antec OCZ GameXstream 700w