GIGABYTE GA-EP45C-UD3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: The board itself lives up to the name- it is certainly durable. The copper design makes the board itself run amazingly cool, and placement of the onboard items makes setting it up easy (if you attempt to purchase the brick sized Nvidia cards 8800GTS or up, you'll understand what I mean). The board comes with 6 regular SETA connectors + 2 GSATA connectors. The GSATAs are designed to allow onboard RAID 0 setup, which I can tell you is an absolute dream. Two 500Gig 7200RPM HDDs raided together is as good and cheaper than a 10,000 RPM HDD, and you get MUCH more space. The BIOS is very intuitive and easy to use, even allowing USB legacy devices to be run without any problem (for Pre-OS setups and things like that). LOTS of USB connectors as well... lots of every kind of connector, to be honest! All together a great board!

Cons: My only complaint that I've had with it so far is that it has a difficult time reading USB keyboards. If you are using a USB keyboard and attempting to mess with the BIOS, be prepared for the possibility that your keyboard may not work with it. Just grab a USB-PS2 converter and you'll be fine.

Overall Review: If you want to use the onboard RAID with Windows XP, be sure to get a floppy drive. You MUST load the onboard GSATA RAID drivers during installation of XP. You can't load it later. And XP install will not read flash drives or HDDs. Just floppies. I am assuming that (theoretically) that you can turn on USB detection for Legacy drives in the BIOS and this will allow you to use a USB floppy, but just in case it may be worth your while to get an internal floppy. Otherwise, if you don't think you can get your hands on one but do have a CD burner, I suggest looking up how to "slipstream" the drivers into the Windows XP install disk.

If you are using Vista, this won't be an issue, as it can read Flash Drives.

Note- There are 2 kinds of RAID this offers. Read the manual carefully. One of the RAIDs is a software RAID that works using the 6 yellow SATA plugs. Trust me- it is more trouble than it is worth, especially if you have a SATA CD-ROM drive. The other SATA is in the 2 purple connec

Pros: This board is well constructed, lots of SATA, lots of copper for cooling. Stays cool with an older qx6850, and those things are heat beasts.

Cons: The board can't overclock as well as my other gigabyte board. Switching processor from one comp to the other gigabyte board, older p35 the motherboard could run the processor at 400 fsb, which would allow you to use 1600 ddr3. However the p45 board here cannot reach that 400 fsb, it will not post, no matter voltage settings and modifications in bios.

Overall Review: None