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The Bundle

What's in the box?

• the motherboard
• detailed 96 page manual
• poster-size foldout "quick installation" guide in 12 languages
• one page foldout of very detailed CPU installation instructions
• Bluetooth USB adapter with cable and driver CD
• driver & documentation CD
• U-PLUS DPS power module
• A floppy and a UDMA IDE cable
• Clip-on Northbridge heatsink
• Two serial ATA power cable
• Three PCI slot covers for USB and Firewire ports
• Six SATA cables
• SLI bridge module and SLI selector board

This is a VERY complete package. More cables than you can shake a stick at; three extra slot covers with USB / firewire / etc connectors.

The Asus P5ND2-SLI we recently reviewed also had a lot of IO capability and cables; it came with nine SATA cables, and I liked how it had three legacy PCI slots. On the other hand, the Gigabyte has three channels for ATA drives, supporting a maximum of 6 parallel ATA drives, whereas the ASUS only has once PATA channel, supporting two drives.

The Board

Some of the highlights of this board are:

• LGA 775 socket supporting 1066FSB for a theoretical maximum 8.5Gb/sec bandwidth
• dual DDR2 memory channels supporting up to four 667Mhz DDR2 modules for a maximum theoretical throughput of 10.6 Gb/sec
• two PCIx slots supporting 8x mode for SLI configuration (or 16x in single card mode)
• Gigabyte's patented dual power system for better current stability for the processors
• Double bandwidth SATA, allowing for up to 3Gb/sec with Raid-5; including native command queuing for out of order disk operations to improve efficiency
• nVidia's ActiveArmour hardware firewall accelerator, with bundled Norton Internet security
• dual Gigabit lan connectors
• dual data rate IEEE 1394b interface
• 8 channel audio
• Two PCI Express 1x slots with twice the bandwidth of PCI for peripherals
• Two PCI slots for legacy PCI cards
• Gigabyte's DualBIOS for protection from corrupted firmware

As you can see from the photographs, Gigabyte continues to spare no effort in color coding connectors; the board is VERY colorful.

Generally, the board layout is well done and the connectors are well placed - for example, the PATA connectors are placed fairly high up on the board close to drive bays - but unfortunately the placement of some of the connectors such as the power connector near the PCIe 1x slot and beside the PCIe 16cx slot could have been better.

The U-PLUS DPS module sits at an angle due to touching the G-Power heatsink and fan; this does not seem to compromise its proper operation, but does not look right, and does apply some torsion force to the socket.

The three USB ribbon cable connectors are placed in such a way that long USB cables will be needed, which will have to be carefully routed around the PCI slots.

I did like the placement of the six SATA connectors; and while I found the right angle orientation of the third IDE connector strange, it should not present problems in any but the smallest cases.