Gigabyte motherboards have been around for a long time, and they have made some very impressive motherboards over the years. They’re no stranger to the enthusiast market, making both AMD and Intel boards geared towards hard-core overclocking. However, as with the graphic card industry, the largest market (and the most money) is in the mainstream category. For the mainstream consumer, stability, on-board features, and value are paramount – myriad enthusiast settings, tweaking options, and exotic glitz take a back seat.
Gigabyte’s GA-M61PM-S2 is geared towards the user who just wants everything to work right away and get the job done without breaking the bank…but at the same time, getting the job done comfortably, because as you will see there are some things that make this board special. It is the Honda Accord of motherboards if you will – not pretentious or glamorous, but just a cut above the Honda Civic.
The board is based around Nvidia’s GeForce 6100/nForce 430 chipset, and has on-board everything: Nvidia graphics, 8 channel High Definition Azalia audio with a header for optional S/PDIF output, gigabit ethernet, 4 USB ports with 3 internal headers for a maximum of 10 USB ports, 1 firewire port (IEEE 1394) with 2 internal firewire headers, 1 IDE/ATA 133 connector (kind of a bummer since a lot of people still use many parallel ata devices), 4 SATA II ports, and RAID (0,1,0+1,5).
Packaging
Contents are a little on the sparse side, probably to help keep costs down. There’s a CD with drivers and utilities, manual, rear I/O shield, 80-pin IDE ribbon cable, floppy ribbon cable, and two SATA cables. The SATA cables and corresponding connectors on the board are very nice as they are the much more secure snap-in type.
The manual is also a fine piece of work. It’s 80 pages, all in English – good English! – and quite thorough. It describes, in detail, hardware installation, BIOS settings, connector pin-out, audio setup, and very extensive RAID configuration, including how to make an SATA RAID driver floppy for installing Windows XP.
Installing Windows with a RAID configuration has been a very troublesome endeavor for many people, but by carefully following the Gigabyte manual you should have no trouble. There are no additional USB or firewire brackets, but since the headers are present on the board, if you need the extra ports, it is not too difficult to buy some from a third party.
Gigabyte GA-M61PM-S2 Features & Specifications
|
||||
The board is very well designed, with all connectors in convenient locations. Since it is a mini-ATX board, you’re not going to get a whole lot of expansion slots, but since everything is already included, who cares, right? There are a few nice things particularly worth noting.
The memory slots are very logical: to run with dual channel memory, you put the RAM in the same colored slots – the manual also states explicitly how to arrange your memory. The chipset is cooled passively with an attractive copper heat sink. That’s great for keeping things quiet, but honestly, that little heat sink does get pretty hot to the touch.
Underneath the heat sink is the GeForce 6100/430 chip itself. It is interesting that this is a single chip solution; there is no northbridge/southbridge. In 2005 when Nvidia first introduced the GeForce 6100 series, there was the 6100 or 6150 northbridge, and the nForce 430 or 410 southbridge.
The 6100 series is essentially equivalent to an nForce 4 with integrated GeForce 6 family graphics. Nvidia has since been revising and adding to the 6100 family, and according to their website you now have the option of the 6100, 6150, or Quadro NVS 210S northbridge, and the 400, 405, 410, or 430 southbridge.
After extensive searching, it seems that both the 6100/430 and 6100/405 combinations have been integrated into a single chip. Maybe this was a cost-saving feature by Nvidia, but at any rate this explains why you may be surprised to see a single chip board when comparing to older 6100 family solutions.
People will notice that there is limited space around the CPU socket, so over-sized cooling solutions may be a tight fit, or possibly not fit at all. Standard heat-sink-fan units will fit just fine though. Another thing that struck me as odd is that there seems to be no BIOS chip. There is actually a silkscreened area that even says, “BIOS,” but where the chip has gone is anybody’s guess. I searched all over, on the back too, but there was no chip, so I was half way expecting to have a dead board on my hands. But lo and behold, the board worked fine. I guess Gigabyte has replaced silicon with magics these days.
The BIOS itself.
As mentioned before, the manual includes very detailed explanations of all available BIOS settings. It is the well known Award BIOS, and every setting you could think of except for any overclocking, expert voltage settings, or any other enthusiast-type settings. Here is a gripe worth noting: the BIOS has USB mouse and keyboard support DISABLED by default – I have seen this time and again with various motherboard makers, and I really wish they would stop! This is horribly frustrating for people who use USB mice and keyboards!
Included Software
Gigabyte includes some nice things on the included CD…
- Norton Internet Security – full version with three months free subscription
- Kaspersky Anti-virus
- EasyTune5
- @BIOS
- and several other programs you may or may not find useful
Overclocking
As stated earlier, this board has absolutely no overclocking or even advanced CPU or memory settings anywhere in the BIOS. Even the included Gigabyte software, EasyTune5, which really made to help in windows overclocking is limited to hardware monitoring only. This board is just not meant for enthusiastists.
However! Nvidia’s own nTune program has stepped in to save the day for those who want rock solid reliability and ease of use right out of the box, but would also like the opportunity to tweak and push their systems a little bit. Version 5.05.18 was used to successfully (and with perfect stability) lower the HT multiplier to 4, and increase the FSB from 200 MHz to 225 MHz, resulting in a 200 MHz bonus to the CPU. Be cautious though, as this also increased the RAM speed, and there was no way to adjust memory multpliers.
Integrated Video
The GeForce 6100 is the first integrated graphics solution I have truly been impressed with. In 2D Windows, the screen characters are sharp, clear, and allow resolutions of up to 1920×1440. The GeForce 6100 also brings full Microsoft DirectX 9 features to Nvidia’s integrated lineup.
Audio
I have never been a fan of the Realtek audio chips. High CPU utilization, poor sound reproduction, driver issues, and crackling have all overshadowed Realtek. For this motherboard, Gigabyte chose to use the Realtek ALC883, which, if you go to the Realtek website, is branded as a value 7.1 + 2 High Definition audio codec. After comparing the ALC883 to the supposedly top-of-the-line ALC888, the two seem very close though, so I don’t know what makes the ALC883 a “value” product.
In any case, to be fair I gave the on-board audio a try. What I can say is – “Wow!” I would never have expected Realtek to make anything that sounds so good. Maybe I really have Intel to thank since they came up with the whole HD Audio movement, but Realtek sure got the ALC883 right.
The sound is clear, rich, vibrant, there is a very useful “Audio Manager” tool with equalizer and sound settings, and the rear audio plugs are auto-sensing and you can configure each plug individually. One thing I did notice, and Realtek should really, really get squared away on this, is that they are not correctly implementing Creative Labs’ EAX settings for games.
Some people won’t care about this, but I do, and since Realtek plainly says that they support EAX, they should. But at the end of the day, I still give this audio a big nod of approval.
| Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support Ensures top-notch compatibility and performance for all DirectX 9.0 applications, including Shader Model 3.0 titles.Video Scaling and Filtering Scaling and filtering technology delivers a clear, clean image at any window size.Video Color Correction Color temperature correction makes actors’ faces appear natural, rather than washed out and pale, when playing videos on LCD and CRT displays. Display gamma correction ensures videos are not too dark, overly bright, or washed out regardless of the video format or display. NVIDIA CineFX 3.0 Engine NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 3.0 Technology |
NVIDIA® nView™ Multi-Display Technology Advanced technology provides the ultimate in viewing flexibility and control for multiple monitors. (not implemented on the Gigabyte GA-M61PM-S2 board)Full-Speed 32-Bit Color Precision Delivers increased image quality with no performance compromise.NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0 Technology Allows the user to adjust color controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions of their workspace, in order to achieve accurate, bright colors in all conditions. OpenGL® 1.5 Optimizations and Support 300 MHz RAMDAC SDVO Interface |
Tests
Since this is marketed as a mainstream motherboard, the test setup will use less expensive, more mainstream parts.
- Athlon 64 3500+ AM2 2.2GHz with included heat sink fan
- Two 512MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-4300 533MHz in Dual channel mode
- On-board GeForce 6100 graphics with 64MB of system memory used for the frame buffer
- Two Western Digital WD800JD hard disks in RAID 0
- Panasonic DVD-ROM
- LITE-ON Dual Layer DVDRW, model SOHW-1693S
SiSoft Sandra
Sandra is a synthetic benchmark, testing the theoretical capabilities of your computer. Sandra is nevertheless very useful for system comarisons, as well as for testing stability. Athlon 64 CPUs have a built-in memory controller making them score very well in the memory bandwidth section of the test.
Half Life 2
This superb game by Valve is surely one that people will still be playing for years. And guess what? It plays beautifully on the GeForce 6100! Half Life 2 does a very good job of recognizing your system configuration and recommending appropriate settings. In this case, it recommended: model detail: high; water detail: reflect world; shader detail: high; filtering mode: trilinear; vertical sync: off. After trying out a few different resolution and anti-aliasing settings, the highest quality setting that was still playable was 800×600 with 2xAntiAliasing. Truly amazing for integrated graphics.
First Encounter Assault Recon is a game that can bring even the most powerful system to its knees. So how about an unpretentious system like we have here today? Well, in order to play at an even semi-decent frame rate, you’ve got to set the resolution to 640×480, and minimize or turn off all the eye candy. Now, once that is done, you can play the game…but is this really the way you want to play it? My vote is no.
Although it doesn’t have an associated, repeatable benchmark, World of Warcraft (or WoW) is a very fun massively multiplayer game, and extremely popular. Theoretically, you only need a graphics card as powerful as a GeForce 2MX from several years ago. But, like with F.E.A.R., you would have to turn down a lot of eye candy. I am happy to say that the GeForce 6100 performs perfectly well with all the details set to high, and with the resolution set to 1024×768. If at some point the frames per second measure a bit on the low side, you could easily turn the details down a little. My experience playing WoW with this board has been very nice.
This is a great tool for torture testing both your CPU as well as your system RAM. Prime95 is geared towards searching for Mersenne prime numbers. I have no idea what one can do with a Mersenne prime number, but mathematicians seem to get excited by them. If your computer is just sitting around idle, you can put those extra cycles to use, and join the hunt for those elusive Mersennes. Check out http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm for more information.
For our purposes, the longer you can run the Torture Test function of Prime95 without error, the more stable your system should be overall. This is especially useful for testing how stable your system is while overclocking. The test system was left running for 39 hours with zero errors.
3Dmark05
You may love this program, you may hate this program, but it is still a fun technology demonstrator, and can also help you explore the limits of your graphics accelerator. Running the program at stock settings on the GeForce 6100 was painfully slow – we’re talking 1 frame per second slow. Even turning the settings down to a rediculously low 320×240 resolution didn’t help. The framerate only got up to 5-6 fps, so although it runs, it is not a treat.
This has been an exceptional board to work with. It should put to rest anybody’s belief that a board with integrated graphics is boring or good for nothing other than office work. It has everything you could possibly need for the home and office crowd, plenty of multimedia muscle for the artsy folk, and even enough graphics power to satisfy the casual to middle gamer, and if you need more of something, there are 2 extra PCI slots, a PCI-e x16 slot, and a PCI-e x1 slot for adding on.
The board has remained completely stable throughout the entire testing phase, I haven’t had a single nasty surprise. The folks at Gigabyte have designed a board that should be used as the basis of comparison when looking at any mainstream feature-packed motherboard.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||