So what do you guys think of Gigabyte motherboards? Anyone have experience with them? Someone who is very knowledgeable on another forum has pointed me in the direction of these two boards:

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-X48-DQ6 LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-EX38-DS4 LGA 775 Intel X38 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

I am very impressed with both, they both have Crossfire, PCI-E 2.0, tons of connectors, and 45nm support.

The big advantage of Gigabyte boards is the bios are very simple for first timers to overclocking. The DFI board has a very nice feature set, but the bios options are daunting for a first time build. The Gigabytes are supposed to be excellent for overclocking and the bios are supposed to very simple to configure.

So any thoughts, queries, or ideas?

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Well, I have a gigabyte mobo on my current build.. core2duo E6750. It has a simplistic way to overclock as well as advanced options for experts to OC'ing.
The main reason I like the gigabyte boards is that they use solid capacitors and other nice features to help keep the heat/power usage down for you... plus as you said they have tons of connections etc. I for one will most likely stay a gigabyte customer in the future

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Ok, thanks for the input Paddy. I really like the DQ6 X-48.

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-X48-DQ6 LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

It's a really sweet board, lots of connectors, plenty of headroom for OC, CrossfireX, 45nm support , 4 eSATA ports, it even comes with 2 eSATA brackets. I read a review on motherboards.org last night and it performed very well in most of the benches, outclocking more expensive boards in several. It was at the bottom in a couple, but mostly it was top to midrange.

The other board I'm looking at is the Asus Formula Striker II:

Newegg.com - ASUS Striker II Formula LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

It has a very nice feature set and tons of bios settings. Asus generally has a good rep, but the horror stories I've heard about their non-existent customer service and RMA hassles honestly have me leaning towards Gigabyte at the moment. I downloaded the User's Manual for both boards, and I believe I'm going to make my final decision from these two. That could change (as have all my specs lol), but it's getting within a week or so of when I can actually build this PC, so time to narrow down the final contenders. Once I make a final decision on the mobo, the rest of it will be pretty easy. Like I said, I'm leaning towards Gigabyte at the moment.

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Yeah, I like asus boards too.. but have had an issue with one in the past - of all things on the board to go it was the PS2 keyboard connection, which you might think is no big deal...... but, it stops you from entering the bios config to change anything
Hence, that's why my old PC is stuck at a 10% OC and is now being used by my sister, LOL.

Anyway, good luck with everything man... let us know how you get on with it.

I'm still not sure whether to go intel or AMD for my next build... I will have to think about it a while longer. I'm not building another PC for around 3-12 months anyway.... I'm hoping AMD have their issues with the phenom's cache sorted out by then though, then no more FSB

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Yeah that sucks man, I would be so pissed if that happened. Seemingly not a big deal yet it can kind of cripple your system at the same time.

From the benches I've read, the Q6600 is the way to go. The Q6700 was just slashed in price, you could probably reach a stable 4.0Ghz per core with a nice board and RAM on that one. I honestly haven't researched the Phenom in depth, but I know it's still nowhere near the Q6600 in benches and peak power. I don't game, I multi-task, that's where the Q6600 really will shine imo.

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Yeah, I'm still undecided about which way to go when I finally build another PC... the phenom is 2.4Ghz unclocked and with the hyper transport system being something like 2600Mhz as opposed to the FSB on the intel mobo being around 1100Mhz.... so it's a tough call really.
I will do some more research on the AMD chipsets etc before I decide for sure.. I know where I am with intel, but on the other hand I don't like all the FSB business, although it's rumored that they are ditching the FSB for a better transport system too.. so who knows??

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Hmm yeah I'm not real familiar with the Hyper Transport System deal. Hopefully some motherboards will come along that can make use of it.

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there are already some motherboards for it, the only problem is that AMD has some probs with the level 3 cache on their phenom CPUs apparently.

Here's a good example of an AMD2+ mobo:-

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G Socket AM2+ onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard - Ebuyer

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I dont personally like Gigabyte boards, working with them is such a hassle. My company have them for our server, and they tend to chock when doing a dual network feed. Super Micro to the rescue

Aside of that, I stick to EVGA, XFX and ASUS board when it comes to Intel Chips. Foxconn lost me as an user awhile back, when I had some issues with the RAID setup and north bridge clocking.

Man, I have a few Phenoms, and I haven't even tried it yet, lol. Time to build an AMD machine for benching

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Xbox 360 - 2 Games - 2 Controllers - 120GB Elite - Dead
PS3 - 23 BD Games - 13 PSN Games - 9 Controllers - 320GB - Alive
Wii - 6 Games - 4 Wiimotes - Alive
PC - Overkill - God like :]

Gaming Generations | XnogarD Production - Soon!!!

Yeah, let me know how you get on with the phenoms please Kam.. would like to hear from someone that's got both intel and AMD to see the comparison.

[note] used your link to create myself a CPU-Z report too

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