The Intel D945GCNL is a cost effective solution for those on a tight budget.This board offers support for Pentium 4, Celeron D, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo processors and i am running a core 2 duo 2.4ghz on this board.
Feature wise it supports upto 2 GB of DDR2 SDRAM but i managed to install a 1GB ram on one slot and another 2GB on the second slot and the whole 3GB Ram works perfect!!
coming to audio,this board consists of the realtek hd audio 5.1 sound card which is excellent and plays anything flawlessly with my creative 5.1 channel speakers!
The graphics department is handled by the graphics media accelerator 950.Now there are many things that need to be clarified here: * This card contains 64MB Video memory and anything extra is only taken from the RAM
* This doesnt contain Hardware TnL which is a basic feature in many games now(However this can be emulated using a few tools)
* This card DOESNT conatin vertex shader 2.0. It ONLY contains pixel shader 2.0 and the latter is very much required if you want to play any games like splinter cell pandora tomorrow or need for speed carbon or call of duty 2 etc..
However there is some light for windows vista users as some modified drivers can run a few of those shader 2.0 games on this card!
Next,the network adapter is a realtek ethernet card which handles things really nicely!!!
It contains 2 PCIE slots and has support SATA also. The box comes with an installation guide,required cables,the mobo(of course) and a drivers cd!
Conclusion
All in all this motherboard is top in terms of price/performance ratio. For such a cheap price, it forms a great package. But for those who wish to do a bit of serious gaming on integrated graphics,please look for a gigabyte or asus motherboard which has nvidia graphics supporting shader model 3.0
Have a nice day!!
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Dec 8th, 2008
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