Conclusion of Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R Mainboard Review
Bluetooth 31 Jul 2007

Pricing of Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R >>>

Conclusion

Who says integrated chipset won't perform and works slower and has lesser features that full ATX boards. The GA-G33M-DS2R proves that this is not true.

GA-G33M-DS2R comes with 1 PCIe x4, 2 PCI, 1 PCIe x16. As it has 2 PCIe slots with an open ended PCIe x4, you can run two graphics cards on this board in CrossFire mode too. This mATX completes with top notch features just like any full atx board. They include Realtek HD audio Codec, GbE PHY, TI 1394 controller. There are also 6 orange SATA II connectors supported by ICH9R. To its right is 4 DDR2 slots supporting DDR2-800 (up to 8GB in total). Below it is the IDE connector and 24 pin power and floppy connector.

Overclocking wise, there are CPUCLK, ASync settings, ram timing adjustments, voltage adjustments. You can check the gallery for more details. We were able to reach 490 x 6 on E6300 using the embedded video. Cpu voltage was set to 1.45v and DDR set to +0.2v, ram multiplier set at 2x. Looks like the Gigabyte GA-G33-DS2R has prove that the INTEL G33 is equally good in overclocking just like the P35 chipset.

Performance wise, this board is as good as any discrete chipset out there when paired with an external VGA card. With its integrated video, the G33 surpasses benchmarks of the 945G but still falls behind the G965 and ATi RS600 integrated chipset.

In conclusion, although this board does not come with the bell and whistles of HD decoding, the onboard video is reasonable for DVD playback. If you intend to use it to decode HDDVD or BluRay videos, you might consider pairing it up with an external VGA card.

Discuss

Pros

• 8 USB 2.0 ports
• 4 DIMM slots
• 1394
• GbE
• CrossFire
• Overclockability

Cons

• ClearVideo

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

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