1986 was a big year for a certain research and development team which took the name of GIGABYTE. Over the years the company took the lead in motherboard design and is now a respected name when it comes to system manufacturers. Using high quality components and providing users with frequent bios upgrades, the company has earned the respect and fame it deserves.



The GA-EG45M-DS2H is Gigabyte's implementation of the Intel G45 chipset for the LGA 775 socket. The G in G45 means the chipset has integrated graphics, namely Intel GMA X4500HD. This allows the motherboard to work without an additional graphics card and still provide acceptable graphic power.



The board comes complete with VGA, DVI and HDMI capable output, and since the X4500HD supports HD playback (with HDCP), you can output the video signal directly to your LCD TV, without the need of a PC monitor.



The board comes with 5 internal SATA II ports with 3Gb/s transfer rates and one eSATA port located on the back panel 9also 3Gbps). Raid 0, 1, 5, and 10 are also on the list. One PCU Express x4 slot is used for gaming lovers that want even more graphic juice and another 3 PCI (one Express X1 and 2 regular PCI) slots are used for tuners, audio cards and other stuff.



Gigabyte designed the GA-EG45M-DS2H to use 4 DDR2 memory slots for a max. of 16GB of RAM used in a dual channel memory architecture. On the back of the board we can find 6 high speed USB 2.0 connectors together with a FireWire port and the Ethernet connector. There's also support for 7.1 channel high definition audio by using the Realtek ALC889A audio codec.



Among the long list of Gigabyte features we can spot a few interesting names like: Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced (improved power consumption), Ultra Durable 2 (using top of the line high quality components), Ultra TPM (hardware based encryption feature) and the DualBIOS thing designed as a backup if you screw up your hardware while doing a bios update or just in case something goes wrong.



For someone who doesn't need for every thing in the computer to be a top performer, the GA-EG45M-DS2H is a pretty good solution considering the $150 price tag.