GIGABYTE GA-EG43M-S2H LGA 775 Intel G43 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: This board works well in Linux, considering how new the board is. However, you can make everything work with a little bit of work. There are lots of great connectors, most notably DVI, which can be used to do dual-head with the VGA port. You can also get a cheap SDVO card to add other graphics ports (to support two DVI monitors simultaneously, for example). The G43 is supported by Intel, and you don't need any binary drivers! If you aren't a gamer, I would highly recommend getting one of these instead of some motherboard where you would have to get a separate graphics card. Intel has much better support for 2D graphics (dual-head, on the fly resizing and rotation, kernel modesetting, etc.) than any other manufacturer, and the 3D support is more than good enough for me.

Cons: It's definitely bleeding edge. Some things aren't supported out of the box in Linux. The G43 graphics card is only supported with the 2.4.0 version of the Intel driver, which isn't yet in most Linux distributions. The network driver has a bug and doesn't work well with the 2.6.25 driver, although apparently people are working on fixing the problem. For now I'm just using a PCI card. When Fedora 10 comes out, this shouldn't be a problem. I noticed in the manual that the memory slows down to DDR2 667 if there are four modules, but it goes at DDR2 800 if there are only two modules. Weird.

Overall Review: In Fedora 9, I had to do the following to get the graphics supported: yum --enablerepo=rawhide kernel xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-drv-i810 libdrm (I might have installed a few more packages in addition to these). I then set 'Driver "intel"' in xorg.conf. It's a new board, so this is completely understandable.

Pros: HDMI, 1080p, Dolby Digitial 5.1, DTS, Plenty of SATA & USB. Works great with my 65" DLP (Overscan adjustments were perfect).

Cons: You have to change the speaker setup to 2.0 to allow for 2-channel PCM audio stream. No RAID (but you can get the G45 model for that).

Pros: Lots of connections. Especially liked HDMI, DVI, eSATA and optical sound. Onboard video works OK and the board was very easy to install & setup.

Cons: Gigabyte only wired the PCI express 16 slot for 4X speed. I was in a hurry and didn't notice that. Although the onboard video works, it only gives a Vista rating of 1.0 (as low as you can get). Definitely not a gaming solution. Why in the world would Gigabyte put so many features into a motherboard but not even fully wire the only PCI express slot?

Overall Review: I was going to RMA this board, but learned that PCI-express running at 4X is as fast as AGP 8x. So I dropped in a $37 ATI HD2600XT video board and the Vista score shot up to 5.4. I'm keeping the MB, but even with all of the good things this board has, I wouldn't have bought it knowing it only has a 4X PCI express slot. It has limited upgrade possibilities, but everything that it does have works fine.

Pros: It's an all inclusive board which makes it easy to build a relatively cheap system from.

Cons: It will only support 8 Gb of memory at DDR2 800 if you have 2 x 4Gb. If you put any combination of DDR2 800 with 4 sticks of memory in it, it won't boot. USB keyboard and mouse support are turned off in the BIOS, better have a PS/2 keyboard handy when initially configuring this. The layout of the board is odd and you can pretty much plan on connecting everything outside of the case and then sliding the motherboard in. There are no POST beeps so troubleshooting involves trying to decipher 4 LEDs on the board. The manual is pretty weak.

Overall Review: The motherboard works well inside the Rosewill mid-Tower case. You'll probably need to update the BIOS right off the bat. Plan on spending a fair amount of time going through their website, the layout is poor and there doesn't appear to be a US mirror so the site is pathetically slow coming from Taiwan.

Pros: Had all necessary drivers, seems very well constructed and solid, has tons of all the latest input and outputs, should be very low energy consumption, especially with built-in video (including VGA, DVI, and even HDMI)!

Cons: I wish it had one more IDE connection, but I guess it's time to convert everything to SATA...

Overall Review: I think this is as close to a perfect motherboard as I have seen yet.

Pros: Fanless chipset cooling. Lots of plugs (if they worked).

Cons: DVI / HDMI ports simply don't work for me. Nothing at all. Not even BIOS POST will display through them. Kind of annoying, since I bought the board for them. Though it doesn't seem like other people are having this problem. I would also like to smack the board layout designer who thought it was brilliant to place the secondary ATX power cable all the way on the far side of the board from the PSU, certainly not close to the main plug-in. I have to get some kind of cable extender if I want to use a PCI slot, because right now the secondary ATX power cable is stretched tight over them.

Overall Review: Intel Linux video drivers are unstable. This isn't a Con because I knew this would be a problem going in, it's just a fact of life on the bleeding edge. Stick with a G33 if this is going to be a problem... Ethernet wasn't a problem surprisingly. Realtek drivers installed fine even with debian stable kernel 2.6.18. I suppose if I get a cheap PCI-E card I can resolve my problems. But I bought this board because I wouldn't need to get a separate video card. Sigh.

Pros: Everything you need are there. mATX small form factor & configuration gave me plenty of room to work with and it was easy for me to do clean cable management with my EATX case. Glad that I've researched the size of the MB and my case.

Cons: USB keyboard BIOS setting should be Enabled from the factory. Since most of people using USB keyboard these days.

Overall Review: Good product/price & Super Fast Shipping NewEgg.

Pros: Low power draw and lots of features at a great price. Perfect board for a Lightroom/Photoshop/Office machine. Handles lots of drives and dual independent monitors (although only one can be DVI or HDMI, the other is analog VGA).

Cons: First board (see my prior post) would not post. It turns out that one of my two Corsair memory sticks was also bad. But with the replacement board, at least is was able to post with one of the sticks, unlike the original.