Product Reviews

The first things you notice about Gigabyte's GA-G1975X motherboard are the two blue heat sinks around the LGA775 processor socket. With two fans on each heat sink, this motherboard looks as if it means business.

This first impression isn't wrong, as this is the first board we've seen that uses Intel's i975X chipset. It supports all LGA775 processors, even the new dual-core chips with 1,066MHz frontside buses.

The board has two

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PCI-E x16 slots, which can accept two graphics cards, although nVidia hasn't yet released SLI drivers for this chipset. However, this board supports CrossFire, so you can run two ATI cards. It also lags slightly behind nVidia's latest nForce 4 chipset, as running two graphics cards slows both slots to x8 speed rather than the full x16.

Standard performance is very good but, using the performance mode in the BIOS, we overclocked our 3.6GHz processor to 3.7GHz, achieving a score of 142 in our application tests. The system was very stable, thanks to the extra fans.

The GA-G1975X has all the features you'd expect on a motherboard, including four SATA2 ports with RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, two PCI-E x4 slots and two PCI slots. However, the PCI slots are between the graphics card slots, so using dual cards blocks access to them.

This accomplished board delivers stable, high performance, but it's one of the most expensive we've seen and doesn't support SLI. We'd rather buy an nForce 4 SLI board for around £70 less.