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Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 (S4304096) Motherboard Review

Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 (S4304096) Motherboard ratings

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Overall (271 Reviews)

Newegg.com (256 Reviews)
Mwave.com (12 Reviews)
Amazon.com (2 Reviews)

Specs & Features

Released

1 year ago

Socket Type

Socket AM2

Form Factor

MPN

S4304096

On Board Graphic Processor

NVIDIA GeForce 6100

UPC

4719331849115

Video Interface

PCI Express

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What People Say

Summary: This is an excellent motherboard at a really great price, I actually paid more for the 2GB of RAM I put into it than the motherboard cost me! It can take a lot of drives with its 4 SATA II & 1 IDE connector (which is great if you have some legacy drives). With 4 RAM slots and support for up to 16GB of RAM there's plenty of room to add memory down the road. The on-board Gigabit Ethernet, audio, and video are all most people besides gamers will need, and with a PCI Express 16x slot gamers can upgrade the video to suit their needs. There's plenty of USB2 ports and even 1 Firewire port. The only problem I've had with this board was getting Windows XP installed onto a SATA drive, and that's a problem with XP and the nForce drivers instead of an issue with the motherboard. You can't go wrong with this board, it's a bargain! from Mwave.com Summary: AMD A64 X2 5000+ Black Edition; A-DATA 2x2GB DDR2 800 RAM; Arctic Freezer pro 64 cooler; Antec Earthwatts 500W; etc. Chipset Driver installation was a breeze. However the board comes with F5 bios. I had to flash to F6 with the @BIOS utility without a floppy drive or FAT IDE hard drive. Help my breath but it worked. Simply changed the multiplier from 13 to 15 in the BIOS, now the CPU is running at 3Ghz, RAM running at CPU/8. I will tweak the OC further, after I feel comfortable about the temperature readings from the BIOS, GA's EasyTune, and speedfan are dependable. from Mwave.com Summary: I am having a generally good experience with this motherboard, with the following additional notes.Some people have complained that the board is irregularly sized. I did not have this problem. My case accommodates all sorts of motherboards, so all I had to do was to move a couple of mounting posts.I actually preferred the smaller motherboard. It gave me more space to route ribbon cables to the floppy and the IDE drives.Included SATA cables that snapped into place. This gave me a positive sense that my hard drive was securely attached to the motherboard. I didn’t get that with the cheap connectors they used on the SATA cables supplied with my previous motherboard, an MSI.The supplied CD was useless for installing drivers.Their tech support line was busy when I called at 12:30 PM on a Thursday to double-check that my first board really was DOA. Redialing got me through. They put me on hold with really awful music that constantly kept changing volume. I was on hold for only about five minutes. The technician quickly directed me to the solution to my problem. Neither the troubleshooting section of the manual nor their webpage had described the particular pattern of beeps I was getting on bootup (three long, one short, a pause, then continuous long beeps), and neither had explained (as the tech support person did explain) that a memory problem, as indicated by these beeps, would exist not only (a) if I had a bad RAM stick but also (b) if I took all of the RAM out of the system.Their tech support website indicates that they determine warranty date based upon date of manufacture. They do not do cross-shipping under any circumstances, so if you need to replace your motherboard, they advise you to expect a turnaround time of two to three weeks – which is, of course, ridiculous for people who actually use their computers. from Mwave.com Pros: Stable, reliable Cons: Not super-fast. Iffy tech support. The Bottom Line: A very good motherboard for general-purpose use. from Shopping.com Summary: Easy to install all components relatively open space and a good amount of PCI card slots. So far it is running very stable no crashes but I haven't really done any over clocking our any thing else that may make it less stable. from Mwave.com Summary: This motherboard is running an Athlon 64 x2 at 2.5ghz with This has decent built in sound and video. You won't want to play games but if you're not gaming you probably won't need to get a dedicated video card.The only drawback is that it doesn't have more than one IDE channel, so you will probably need to get a SATA hard drive. from Mwave.com Summary: Within a few days, the SATA connections seemed to be failing, but Gigabyte sent a replacement board, and now it works fine.The board itself is laid out quite nicely, with the SATA and IDE connections down below, where drives would normally be (unlike on some cards I've seen where they're up above the RAM).I thought it was a bit too colorful, but it doesn't matter, since it's inside a windowless case. Overall, it's a very good, affordable board. from Mwave.com Summary: Great features, stable, easy to configure, great manual, plain good board. The board started right up, was configured in 5 minutes, Auto settings picked up timings just fine. I made good use of the Xpress Recovery 2 utility (allows you to recover your operating system from a second partition). from Mwave.com Summary: I don't find much trouble as other people did since it was shipped with latest bios. This board is well made comparing to boards from other brands with similar configurations. Though it only has one IDE, my PCI IDE-expansion card have it covered. It runs well w/ Athlon x2, and Crucial RAM though not certified. from Mwave.com Summary: Some have reported that the board only recognizes 1 drive on IDE, but it will work if hard drive is the master. Floppy connector is at the bottom of the board, which could be a problem depending on the case used. My case (Cooler Master Centurion 531) has the floppy drive slot near the bottom of the case, so it wasn't an issue. Upgrade the BIOS to F4, especially if you have issues with PCI cards! from Mwave.com

Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 (S4304096) Motherboard Review

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