New G31 motherboard

Bolletje

Yet again a delay Now it's the 25th.

I'm really wondering about buying the MSI G41...

RE III - Frankie

Hey, It's the 22nd. Did it come yet?

Edit: sry didn't see your post. 25th then.

Bolletje

Uhu, it was a little bit delayed :r

According to my account they sended it today to me. So it will be here tomorrow

I will try to post pics,


Edit,

Woohoo!! They called this midday because they wanted to know if someone was at home here. My sister said yes and less than an hour later a delivery was made Top service indeed in that point of view.

V 1.1 though.

Bolletje

Well, I thought a mini-review would be nice of this board:

tags: review gigabyte ga-g31m-es2l g31m-es2l g31 e5200 e5300 e5400 overclock overclocking ram cooler matx uatx intel spd igp 8111c alc883 realtek ich7 ich 7

Introduction
S775 CPU's are EOL and G31 chips will be too by the end of this year (See news section). So I thought that I need to be quick and get a S775 board. The G31M-ES2L from Gigabyte it was. Why I got a G31? The price of the board was quite low (40 euro) and it had a lot of features. It also was mATX so I could place it easily in another small case.

Why Gigabyte? I've already got a board from them and I'm quite happy with it.


Packaging
I never had a mATX board before, so the package was small. I liked it in some sort. The content:

• G31M-ES2L
• 2 yellow SATA cable (1 with 90 degree plug)
• 1 IDE cable
• Manual
• Driver CD
• I/O backplate

Not that special, but it can get you started.

Picture of box:



So mine is rev 1.1 which means that I have a Realtek audio chip and a Realtek LAN chip. 2.0 has a Atheros audio chip
2.0 has different (aluminium) heatsinks and 2 oz copper, while I have copper heatsinks.

Board lay-out


As you can see it's a simpel motherboard. However it completely supports all the 45 nm CPU's. Only some old Pentiums and Celerons aren't supported. So in that point of view the big difference between a G41 and G31 is that the G41 has a better IGP (GMA 4500 so other connectors are supported)

This board however has a GMA 3100 which has an VGA output. Good enough for surfing/office/server etc. The board has an 16x PCI-e 1.1 slot. I had some problems with the board: when I installed a external videocard (9500GT in this case) it didn't always worked. So you would get an output through the onboard VGA connector. When I finally got it working I saw that my card was working @ 1x in stead of 16x. I needed to restart the PC some times before it finally worked properly (I have the lastest BIOS however: F9).

Well it's not that problem if you don't switch graphics cards all the time, but I do so it annoyed me a little bit.

There are 4 SATA ports which are connected to the ICH7. This SB doesn't supports RAID, while some cheap AMD boards do, but still not that bad since the average user doesn't use RAID (some never heard of it).

The CMOS battery is located at a unusual spot: above the PCI-e slot. I have a Megahalems installed so it is tight.

The audio chip is a Realtek ALC883. You've got a line-in, a line-out and a mic plug. You could use 8 channel audio, but you will need an extra cable for that. Like most people these are the ports that really matter.
You can, if you have a Nvidia card like me, use the SPDIF output on the board for audio through HDMI.

LAN chip is the Realtek 8111C chip (10/100/1000 Mbit). This works really well and can easily download drivers from the GB site. Windows 7 even don't need them at all.

(For the Mac Users: this board is out-of-the-box compatible with Mac OSX )



Overclocking
This motherboard supports a FSB of 1600 MHz, which is quite high. However, this board lowest SPD is 2.66! So with my 800 MHz RAM you will only get 300 MHz FSB (yes I can overclock it, but other people don't have the best RAM). I have a Celeron 430 which I clocked to 2.7 GHz quite easily. A 50% increase and you can really notice it.

Due to the low SPD you can best install a CPU with a high MP in it. The E5xxx serie is perfect in this case. I will soon get a E5200 (40 euro) so I will keep you guys informed. So with the MP of 12,5 of the E5200 you can reach 3,75 GHz! And then you have a real quick machine for a low price!

With better RAM you can acheive much higher results.

BIOS - Overclock


As you can see you can't change the timings of the memory! The board is cheap so some features aren't just available. But in most cases lowering 5-5-5-18 (common timing) to 4-4-4-12 hasn't that big effect on game performance. More in benchmarks like SPI.
So you have everything you need for the beginner


As I mentioned earlier I have got BIOS version F9 installed. Flashing goes really easy: put the BIOS file on a USB stick for example (you can download the BIOS from the Gigabyte site) put it on the PC. During the boot you can hit Fx (x = number that I forgot, but it's clearly visible :P), select the file, hit enter and you're done


Conclusion
A good motherboard for the price (40 euro). Lots of CPU's are supported and you can easily add an graphics card if you want to play games. You also have Gbit LAN which can come in handy since the speeds of the ISP's are going up. Warranty of 3 years is also a big plus and overclocking with this board is real easy. Bad things are the location of the CMOS battery, the conflict with the onboard VGA and you can't set the timings of your RAM. Nevertheless a top product!