In the world of Gigabyte, ‘Royal’ means top-of-the-range, so this board has every extra feature Gigabyte can think of. The box is creaking under the weight of all the things packed into it.
There’s a Serial ATA cable for each of the six headers, and two backplates for extra ports. One usefully combines two USB ports with FireWire and FireWire 800. Then there are the more esoteric inclusions. The Bluetooth USB dongle is an interesting example and useful for wirelessly synching portable devices. There’s also a daughterboard with additional VRMs for a smooth supply of power. The board will work without this daughterboard, and we preferred this to improve airflow to our rear exhaust fan.
Feature table eagles will have spotted the maximum RAM speed this board can support is quoted as 888MHz. That was fast for a processor a few years ago. We found Corsair’s PC8000 (1GHz) RAM on www.eclipsecomputers.com for a reasonable £160 per 1GB matched pair, and these should yield slight performance benefits; just don’t expect miracles.
Gigabyte beats the standard 7.1 High Definition Audio of the Intel 955X chipset with the same Realtek ALC882M audio codec of the MSI 945G, which supplies two extra independent audio channels. The ‘M’ suffix denotes its compatibility with Dolby Master Studio. This board also beats the Intel on price, being almost £20 cheaper. However, the Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe is cheaper still and offers dual-core Extreme Edition support, if not the same theoretical audio quality.
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