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The most striking thing about the Gigabyte GA-81875 Ultra is its garish colour scheme. Its aquamarine PC board is inoffensive, but the bright purple and orange Dimm sockets and lime-green AGP slot make it look more like a child's toy than a piece of computer kit.
To its credit, though, it uses one of the most advanced chipsets on the market, the Intel 875P, and provides great potential for upgrading. There are five PCI slots and its six Dimm slots can accept up to 4GB of PC3200-rated memory at a time. For storage, there are four Raid-compatible IDE channels. There are also four Sata connectors that should provide performance gains when used in conjunction with compatible disks.
As is common in many Gigabyte motherboards, this one has dual Bios support. This means if anything adverse should happen to one Bios chip, such as a firmware upgrading mishap or malicious damage through a virus, the secondary Bios chip can take control of the system upon rebooting.
The GA-81875 Ultra is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of its connectivity. It features eight USB2 ports, four of which are onboard, but there are no Firewire ports as standard. Some ports can be added through a blanking plate, but at further expense. You do, however, get support for Gigabit Lan and onboard six-channel audio.
Overall, performance was solid. However, the board was outperformed by the older chipset in Soltek's submission.
On the whole, this is a motherboard that can be recommended if you want Prescott compatibility from a recognised vendor. It provides good scope for upgrading, relatively good performance and an adequate range of features. Our only real concern is that there are a number of other motherboards in our group that offer better value for money.
Contact: Gigabyte 01908 362 700
www.gbt-tech.co.uk
Back to Intel motherboards group test
See also:
This motherboard's colour coded fixtures makes installation straightforward. 14 May 2004
All Motherboards
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