Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2

The GA-965GM-S2 is centered around the intel Express G965 chipset, featuring four SATA 3.0 connectors and one PATA connector for legacy optical drives. Gigabyte adds their own SATA 3.0 RAID controller that provides two SATA 3.0 connectors, and of course the chipset provides legacy connectors such as a floppy connector and serial/parallel/PS2 ports. A 1000BaseT ethernet connector and IEEE 1394 connector are included on the back panel, along with four USB 2.0 ports. The motherboard features one PCI Express x16 slot for a video card, two regular PCI slots, and a single PCI Express x1 slot. The motherboard also has headers for six additional USB 2.0 ports, SPDIF out, and two additional IEEE 1394 connectors. Not to forget anything the board also features 8-channel high definition audio and perhaps the best of all, integrated intel GMA X3000 graphics (more on that later). Sounds like alot for a micro ATX motherboard, and indeed it is too much as my case was only able to utilize half of the internal connectors and headers

The motherboard took my Pentium D 930 with no issue, although I have issue with the high stock temperatures that the processor gives off. That is not a fault of the motherboard but rather an unfortunate side-effect of the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture.Moving from single channel DDR-400 RAM to dual channel DDR2-800 RAM yielded an impressive improvement in memory bandwidth, with Everest Ultimate 3.5.0 showing a memory read score of 6381 MB/s and memory latency of 95.6 ns