If you were in a position to talk about motherboards, you should recognize the name Giga-Byte pretty well. If not, then you can now find out that their among the best motherboard manufacturers in the world. Using only high quality components and top of the line manufacturing materials, the company made a name for itself with gamer grade motherboard, but also by offering casual users solutions.



Among integrated solutions we have the GA-M78SM-S2H. Why is this an integrated solution? Because it uses an integrated graphics chip, namely the GeForce 8200 chipset. Firstly, this is an AMD chipset, so Intel fans go look elsewhere. It's among the first to fully use the AM2+ socket by supporting HyperTransport 3.0, so if you plan on buying a Phenom cpu this board is one solution.



One thing to note is that the board comes in a Micro-ATX form factor. This is not a prime choice for gamers since there's just one PCI Express 16X slot, and using it for a better graphics card will render the rest of the PCI slots useless in case you buy a dual slot solution.



Besides that we have the usual stuff: dual channel memory controller (old stuff really..), 6 SATA ports (not that impressive), I IDE connector, 4 USB 2.0 ports (lame), Ethernet connector and the standard audio jacks.



Since none of the above features is really that impressive, why don't we have a look at the video output possibilities? As it comes with a an integrated GPU we can see a D-sub connector, a DVI connector, and the all so popular (these days) HDMI (HDCP capable). What could be disturbing at this point is that the DVI does not support the use of an D-sub adapter. So if you had hopes for your two D-sub monitors, sorry. They're too old anyway, Just throw them away.



Now if you are a gamer and are still thinking about this motherboard, you will be pleased to know that something called the NVIDIA Hybrid SLI is present. This can be used in two ways. First you can set your add-on graphics card on steroids with the help of the integrated GPU, or you can use Hybrid Power to let the integrated GPU handle none-demanding tasks while disabling the power hungry add-on card. Don't worry, it will start up again when the integrated GPU is not strong enough.



The board can be bought for $78.9.