Review: Gigabyte GA-G31MX-S2 motherboard

This motherboard uses one of Intel's latest mainstream chipsets - the G31 Express. On this board Gigabyte has paired the G31 with the ICH7 Southbridge.

The ICH7 might be a couple of generations old, but it's still perfectly capable of doing the job and it helps keep the price of the board down.

Because of the compact nature of Micro ATX boards, there are compromises to be made with the board layout.

For instance, the two Dimm memory slots have locking latches that are very close to the single PCI Express x16 graphics card slot. Furthermore, the locking lever may also cause access problems once the board is installed in a case.

As well as four 3Gbits/sec Sata2 ports there is also an ATA-133 port. According to Intel's website the G31 only supports 1,066/800MHz FSB processors, however Gigabyte says the board will also support 1,333MHz FSB CPUs. Indeed, we tested ours with a 1,333MHz E6750 without any problems.

The GA-G31MX-S2 also supports multi-monitor setups and at first glance it's easy to miss how. Under the two PCI slots is a single orange-coloured PCI Express x4 slot that, when you look closely, is open-ended meaning that it accepts a full length graphics card. So, with a card in the x16 slot you get four monitor support. You also get integrated graphics powered by Intel's GMA3100 graphics core, so if you won't be playing games or using other graphic-intensive applications any gaming support then there's no need to buy a dedicated graphics card.

The board comes with integrated 7.1 audio and Gigabit Lan. Four USB2 ports on the I/O panel are backed up by two headers on the motherboard, although there are no bundled brackets.

Available for just over £50, the GA-G31MX-S2 is a good value Intel motherboard.

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