The Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard Review

Bundle And BIOS

The bundle included with the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H is pretty thin, but gets the job done to get up and running. They have included floppy, IDE and SATA cables, a backplate, a video riser that includes component and s-video out and your owners manual. Maybe we just got “lucky,” but we did not have any cd at all with this bundle, so we had to go and download the drivers we needed from the net. Good thing we have another computer or two in the house to do this!

Gigabyte went with the ever popular AWARD BIOS for this board.

The Advanced BIOS page is where we find our settings for boot order.

The Advanced Chipset page is where we find… oh wait, we have to actually find the Advanced Chipset page in order to find anything on it. Once again, and much to the dismay of many, Gigabyte has once again required us to hit Control-F1 in order to get to any advanced options in the BIOS. This is just an extra step, and totally unnecessary. once you do find the page, you will find anything that is available for overclocking the board and setting any advanced DDRII timings.

The main DRAM configuration page is where you will set your primary, and some secondary timings for your ram. There are also a couple of sub-pages to look at.

The mem clock is where you set your ram divider. You have the options of 400/533/667/800.

HT link control is where you will find…

Your HT frequency settings.

FSB can be set all the way up to 500fsb, which was totally unnecessary for this board.

Not much really to talk about on the Integrated Peripherals page. Just straight forward in what it controls.

The Health Status page is very weak, just giving us the temps of two items, no voltages at all.

That is it. You may be saying to yourself, “That is it? Where are the voltage controls?” Well, there are none, so yeah, that is it.