Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Motherboard Review
Budget motherboards have come a long way in recent times and this is especially true of the range of boards coming from the manufacturer Gigabyte. At the time of writing the GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard can be purchased for under £35 and the general feedback that we have been hearing is that, whilst the price is low, this board shouldn’t necessarily be considered a budget motherboard!
So what do you get with the GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard for this small amount of money? Well primarily you get a good solid motherboard that is designed to provide a high quality foundation for a decent computer system as well as allowing simple and cost efficient upgrades in the future.
The GA-G31M-ES2L is a micro ATX motherboard and has an LGA775 socket that supports a range of processors including Core 2 Duo, Core2 Quad, Pentium Dual Core, Celeron 400 sequence, Celeron Dual Core. It has two memory banks that are able to support up to 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM. Ideally you should use both slots of the RAM to take advantage of dual channel memory addressing. So if you were looking at putting in 2GB of RAM, you would be far better putting 2 x 1GB rather than one stick of 2GB!
Connecting your devices should be no problem with this motherboard. It has connectors for 4 x SATA drives and one older ATA connector. Usually only having one IDE connector isn’t such a problem as one cable can run two drives,(assuming that you set the jumper settings accordingly to master and slave). As USB devices are so popular these days you will have 8 slots available to use.
The Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L has onboard graphics, sound and Ethernet. This makes it easy to start building a computer system on a budget with the view to upgrading sound and graphics at a later date if required.
Some may say that having only two PCI slots is not enough but generally these days, it is more than enough with more and more items being run off USB.
For the price, it really is difficult to criticise this board. Sure, if you a looking for the absolute cutting edge computer system that has the latest graphics and the fastest CPU then this board will not be for you but the chances of you looking for a board within this price range would also be unlikely!
To summarise, if you are looking for a decent motherboard upgrade ant a more than decent price the Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard is really an inexpensive and ideal solution that will fulfil the requirements of most, if not all, standard computer users.
