Gigabyte GA-7N400E-L - motherboard - ATX - nForce2 400

Advantages: good board all round
Disadvantages: no probs

...This is the first time that I have built my own pc but second attempt I found it easy to install ,the instruction manual that comes with the motherboard was very easy to read I used a AMD 2500 XP processer and 512 ddr 333 and Geforce 4 MX440 graphics card which I did have a problem installing the driver as every time i installed it it would crash the computer but after many attepts i found there is a windows xp update for the driver and since installing that i have had no problems at all. If you want to build yourself a decent machine but dont want to spend to much on it then this is the board for you... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Supports fast CPU's (upto Athlon 3200+), Crammed with features
Disadvantages: None really

...and allowing for high-speed computing thanks to the NVIDIA nForce™2 Ultra 400 platform, allowing for the Athlon XP Barton 3200+'s to be used to their full potential. Thanks to the dual channel DDR controller your computer has a lot more power (and if you wish to you can have 3GB of fast memory!!) the AGP8X graphics interface means you are able to use the best graphics cards on this, and will be able to enjoy thrilling games such as Doom3 in all their glory (or gory!). 5 PCI slots are included, which allows plenty of room for other cards to be inserted. This is quite a high number, especially as the motherboard is already crammed with so many other good features. Dual LAN is included, so is IEEE 1394 (Firewire), and the latest USB 2.0 allowing fast transfer of data and enables the use of the latest peripherals. Serial ATA and IDE RAID allow you... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Dual Channel Memory Controller, Sound-Storm with digital output, Serial ATA support, Great Overclocking
Disadvantages: South-bridge can sometimes get a little warm

...great feature is the fact that there is what is replacing the IDE connection for hard-drives and slowly optical drives inbuilt into this motherboard - SERIAL ATA. Serial ATA is a new technology designed to give better performance and make drives even easier to install. Instead of having a "master" and "slave" scenario like the IDE channels, Serial has just the 1 Drive allocation, thus removing the need for jumpers and configuration. Serial ATA support is supplied via the Silcon Image SR3112 controller and supports single drives and 2 drives in Raid 0 and raid 1 configuration. Raid 0 is where 2 identical drives - in the case seagate 200 Gb drives "look" as if they are 1 huge 400 Gb drive with the read and write speed increased as the data is written to each drive alternatively - i.e odd blocks on drive A, even on Drive B. Windows does... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful