Review: Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 Pro

Thoughts

From a feature set point of view, you can't really criticise this board - It has everything you would expect for this price point available to it, along with the ability to attach up to eight ATA devices, giving you the opportunity to plug in storage aplenty when you throw in the two SATA ports as well. If you're one of those people who find themselves running out of hard drive space at regular intervals, this is just the kind of functionality you need.

Away from that however, if you are looking for a high performance enthusiast's mainboard, this simply isn't it. The issue which seems to hurt the board the most from a performance perspective is its inability to use the tight memory timings you would hope for and expect, and it certainly doesn't manage to match up to the other boards in our comparison in any test. I'd also like to see Gigabyte move away from hiding crucial settings in the BIOS, opening the board up to the overclocker by default.

So, to close, if you're looking for a stable, simple Socket 754 motherboard, then you would really have no reason to complain with this Gigabyte offering. If you are a performance junkie looking to squeeze all the performance you can out of your system, you'd be better off looking elsewhere.

It's a shame to see the board do comparatively poorly, given that their Socket 939 boards are above average and the nForce3 250 Socket 754 board that we reviewed recently did well.

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