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GIGABYTE C232 Series motherboards support the Intel® Xeon® E3-1200 v5 processor and 6th Gen. Intel® Core™ i3/Pentium®/Celeron® processors, bringing cutting edge features and ultimate performance to your next PC build.
GIGABYTE M.2 solution offers considerably faster storage performance and support for PCIe NVMe SSD devices.
Delivers high quality sound resolution and sound expansion to create the most realistic sound effects for professional gamers.
SATA Express combines the benefits of PCI Express and SATA to provide much higher bandwidth, featuring data transfer rates of up to 16Gb/s.
Multi-graphics configuration offers better graphics performance for gaming enthusiasts who demand the highest frame rates without compromising on resolution.
Intel® GbE LAN features cFosSpeed, a network traffic management application which helps to improve network latency, maintaining low ping times to deliver better responsiveness in a crowded LAN environments.
GIGABYTE's EasyTune™ is a simple and easy-to-use interface that allows users to fine-tune their system settings or adjust system and memory clocks and voltages in a Windows environment. With Smart Quick Boost, one click is all it takes to automatically overclock your system, giving an added performance boost when you need it the most.
GIGABYTE APP Center gives you easy access to a wealth of GIGABYTE APPs that help you get the most from your GIGABYTE motherboard. Using a simple, unified user interface, GIGABYTE APP Center allows you to launch all GIGABYTE APPs installed on your system.
Get the highest levels of performance from your PC with easy to use GIGABYTE overclocking features.
GIGABYTE Cloud Station™ is composed of several GIGABYTE unique apps that allow your smart phones/tablet devices to communicate, share resources, and control your desktop PC via a wireless connection.
GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards feature GIGABYTE DualBIOS™, an exclusive technology from GIGABYTE that protects arguably one of your PC's most crucial components, the BIOS. GIGABYTE DualBIOS™ means that your motherboard has both a 'Main BIOS' and a 'Backup BIOS', making users protected from BIOS failure due to virus attack, hardware malfunction, improper OC settings or power failure during the update process.
GIGABYTE motherboards come equipped with a gold plated CPU socket, which means that enthusiasts can enjoy absolute reliability and longevity for the CPU socket overtime, without having any concerns about corroded pins or bad contacts.
Pros: This board is attractive and has a nice orange LED design not shown in any photos on newegg or gigabyte website. It supports ECC memory. The UEFI Bios is nice and professional looking. you have the option to change the bios splash screen to an image of your choice. you can do that within the app center program. Sata Raid performance is quite good. I installed two Intel 730 Series 480GB SSD's in Raid0 to benchmark performance. Read speed was 1030MB/s. this is very good. each of these drives are rated to read at 550MB/s. I installed 4x WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKX Hard Drives in raid 0 to benchmark performance and i am quite pleased with the performance. i am reaching over 232MB/s. this is better than what these same 4 drives achieved on my H87 Fatal1ty and Z86 Extreme Gen3 Motherboards even though i paired this motherboard with a modest G4400 CPU. Despite the Specifications listed here on newegg, The network adapter is not Realtek, It is actually a Server Grade Intel I219-v NIC. Having this NIC allows it to support more server based applications. however it does not appear that gigabyte had server operating systems in mind when they created the driver disk. That's ok, because Intel has the correct drivers on its website including linux and windows server 2012.
Cons: The first thing i noticed when removing it from the anti static bag. the large heatsink at the top of the board is attached only with pushpins and springs, and is very flimsy, the moment i lifted the board i could feel how loose it was. less than 2lbs of force will cause it to tip sideways and loose contact with the vrms that it is meant to cool. It is important that i mention this because the 8 pin cpu connector is right beside it. be cautious and double check your cable management, if your 8pin cpu connector lays against it you will probably wind up with a dead board. gigabyte should've done a better job here. i will be replacing these pushpins with 3x8mm nylon screws. Certain things about the board seem sloppy, mostly in the bios and manual. For example, the bios has a menu to adjust the CPU Clock Ratio, yet it does not let you, instead it teases you with the option and says this setting is dependant on cpu model. NON-K models have locked CPU Ratios. This motherboard does not support any -K model processors. Also the manual says a lot of things that seem to apply to other boards, Including that the m.2 port supports raid, and that to setup raid it requires two m.2 drives. This board only has a single m.2 port. These instructions look like they are copy, pasted from some other manual. The board only has 3 system fan connectors, And despite having an option in the bios to set the fan speed, the speed does not change at all no matter what setting you change it to. The options are normal, silent, manual, or full speed. This is a broken feature. This board currently does not support i5 or i7 processors. No sli support. no overclocking. No onboard video (due to socket c232 chipset)
Overall Review: This board with it's limited CPU support falls short of being a option for most consumers. the storage options are disappointing, You can either use the m.2 port, or sata express, not both at the same time. and with a pci device installed a m.2 SSD operates at half speed. There really isn't an ideal consumer for this board. This board is oriented towards professionals/workstations. Specifically because of the support for Xeon processors and the most recent bios update adding ECC support. however this chipset should not prevent this board from working with i5 and i7 processors. The advertising of this board is misleading. The box says "Ultra Durable" on it 9 times, yet it doesn't appear to be built better than any other motherboard. the pcb is still 1.5mm thickness like all my other boards. The audio capacitors are only rated to 85c. And the VRM heatsink is not secured in place, almost any force will make it flop around. The box says "ultimate performance" "cutting edge features" "for gaming enthusiasts who demand the highest frame rates" Yet falls short of everything listed on the box. As of right now, the best processor this board supports is a Xeon E3-1280 v5 which is only a quad core. Professionals looking for the best will probably stick with socket 2011v3 as it has support for Xeons and desktop cpu's with far more cores and higher clock speeds. Intel has a 22 core Xeon that is scheduled for release sometime this month. Gamers are going to be interested in I5 and I7 processors because of the price differences compared to Xeon Processors. At the time of this review, Both the Audio Driver and Intel Rapid Storage Driver on the driver disk are out of date. The newer drivers are available through Gigabyte. None of the operating systems i have tried with this board have network drivers by default. I tried windows 7, 8.1, 10, ubuntu, Zorin and steam OS. The windows network drivers are located on the driver disk, however it does not include drivers for linux, or windows server. I had to install a secondary network adapter to get my linux operating systems on the internet. This may change in the future. On the cpu support list (at the time of my review) it only shows cpu support for bios revision f1. however my board arrived with f2 bios. the only information about the f2 bios update says that it includes support for ECC memory. Also, under memory support information it does not indicate which memory modules are ECC or not I hate to leave anything less than perfect reviews, but unfortunately this board falls short from what i expected.