Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 Motherboard (Athlon 64 FX/ Athlon X2, Socket AM2, ATX, 16GB DDR2, 1GHz Bus)

• Reviewed by: apollo_8185139613

  Strengths: Solid product by a solid company; quiet and reliable

  Weaknesses: Pricey; outdated technology (AMD); lay out

  Overall: Solid scores in benchmarks. Good brand, that produces a quality product. No additional onboard fans to generate unnecessary noise. Unknown whether it will support new cores from AMD. If not, will drop significantly in price. Have bought Gigabyte for personal use for the last four years. SLI with 8800s will leave little room for PCI or other expansion slots. IDE, FLoppy and SATA in same cramped location. Well caple to over-clock!

• Reviewed by: jnardello

  Strengths: SLI, color-coded ports, included cables, dual-NIC, RAID controller, heat pipes

  Weaknesses: Useless parallel port. Single IDE port.

  Overall: This motherboard is simply amazing after upgrading from a several-year-old board. Dual PCI-E slots for video, 4 memory slots, a huge amount of SATA ports. I can't wait to make full use of both the SLI capabilities of this board and the SATA connections. The only problem I've found is it's not really designed for IDE devices, just has the one port - so a DVD drive and a HD, and you're done. Anyone upgrading from older gear should plan on buying some SATA drives at the same time and making use of the built-in RAID controller.