Gigabyte GA-7N400-L1 - motherboard - ATX - nForce2 Ultra 400

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: fast nvidia chipset, packed with features
Disadvantages: low on content manuel and slow website

...enables much faster memory access. The maximum system memory on this motherboard is 3GB (gigabyte) with 3 184-pin DDR SDRAM SIMM slots available so expansion is not a thing to worry about. The motherboard also supports dual channel memory interface which basically means faster access to memory with the right memory. Chipset As I said earlier the mother board uses the new NVIDIA chipset but in more detail the mother uses the nForce2 Ultra 400 chip to the control the north bridge and the nForce2 MCP-T chip to control the south bridge. I shall explain the "bridges" for you in brief first of all. The north bridge chip controls the flow of data for the memory, processor, hard drive and the cd-roms/dvd-roms. The south bridge controls the flow of data from the onboard card slots which control AGP slot cards and PCI slot cards. Bus... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Cheap Nforce 2 ultra
Disadvantages: No soundstorm APU

...drives i wasnt bothered about it. Network connectivity id provided by the onboard nforce 10/100mb lan adapter and as with all Nforce chipsets its quick. The installed chipset is an nVidia nForce 2 Ultra 400 supporting blistering disk access and exceptional memory performace. The best chipset around for Athlon XP NOTE HERE This board will support sempron CPU's with a BIOS upgrade. Sound is provided a realtek AC97 on-board card, which was poor, but i used my Audigy 1 anyways so no complaints from me on that. From my own experience of using this board i can say that the build quality is good but board layout sucks, CPU very close to the PSU in most case layouts and the cables from the PSU hang over your CPU to get to the ATX power socket on the board, i call that very bad design. Also the IDE cables running from the bottom... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful