GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: No BIOS issues. Mine came with F5. Flashed to F9. For some reason, QFlash did not see my USB key. I got a floppy drive sitting around. Plugged the floppy, copied the unzipped F9 files (there is a rudimentory flashing utility in the zip) to a floppy disk. Rebooted and got the BIOS flashed. This is a very overclockable board. You can adjust voltages for CPU, DRAM, chipset (FSB?). F9 recognize my E8400 correctly and set the FSB to 1333 by default, giving me 3 GHz (333 X 9 multipier). When I tried to run 1600MHz, it did not post. The BIOS automatically scaled back to default and went into Windows. I increased the CPU voltage from 1.25v to 1.30v and upped the chipset voltage slightly. The board booted up to 1600MHz (FSB) with CPU clocked to 3.6GHz (400 X 9) without any complaints.

Cons: Not really a con, both the north and south bridges run pretty hot (~55C idle) at 1333MHz FSB speed. If you planning on OC, you will need a custom cooling solution for the bridges. I replaced the stock north bridge heat sink with a Thermaltake CL-C0034 fan and heatsimk, whick brought the temp. down to ~35C with load (Amazing!). I put a 40mm fan on top of the south bridge stoch heatsink. The heatsink became nice and cool.

Overall Review: This is not a full size ATX board. It's somewhat narrower by a couple of inches. You only use 6 screws (vs 9) to hold it down to the case chassis. It's well built and well layed out. If you know you will never run 2 video cards, this is a very nice and OC'able P45 board.

Pros: New Technology. 1600 FSB Support. Inexpensive. Fast Shipping. Great Newegg RMA process.

Cons: Constant Blue Screens and Restarts. IRQ conflicts with the pci-e and pci slots.

Overall Review: About a few months ago researching online about the new P45 lineup and had come across intel having trouble with the pci-express slots. Now i realize as i read more reviews that these problems are more constistant with the ICH10 and not so much with the ICH10R motherboards.