ABIT AW8-MAX & Gigabyte GA-81955X

Gigabyte GA-81955X Royal

Gigabyte, a long favourite of PC enthusiasts has produced yet another “all bells and whistles” board in the GA-81955X Royal. Despite its name, you don’t have to be of noble lineage to use it as the Royal has extra features like a second gigabit LAN port, Dolby Master Studio support and the extra Silicon Image SATA2 controller over the GA-81955X Pro.

Main Feature Overview:

• Complete support for all Intel LGA755 processors, including 533, 800 or 1066FSB bus speeds;
  
• Intel 955X northbridge and Intel ICH7R southbridge;
  
• 1066MHz FSB;
  
• 4x 240-pin dual channel DDR2 memory slots supporting up to 8GB with EM64T processors;
  
• 1x PCI-Express x16 slots, 2x PCI-Express x1 slot, 3x PCI expansion slots;
  
• 1x ATA100 port, 2x ATA133 ports, 4x SATA 2 ports (ICH7R), 2x SATA 2 ports (Sil3132)
  
• 4 (plus 4)x USB2.0 ports;
  
• 1x IEEE1394 Firewire 'A' port and 2x IEEE1394 Firewire 'B' ports;
  
• 8-Channel Realtek ALC882M audio controller featuring Intel's Azalia High-Definition audio codec;
  
• Dual Broadcom PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet Controllers;
  
• Gigabyte Dual BIOS and U-Plus DPS add-in power card.

In the box, we get a healthy helping of extras in the form of:

• 6x orange SATA cables (with locking mechanism);
  
• 1x IDE ATA100 cable;
  
• 1x floppy cable;
  
• 3x sets of molex to two SATA hard disk power converters (providing support for six SATA hard disks);
  
• 2x sets of two USB2.0 PCI brackets;
  
• 1x combination PCI bracket of two Firewire (400 and 800Mbit sockets) and two USB2.0 ports;
  
• 1x metal I/O panel;
  
• 1x USB Bluetooth adapter;
  
• 1x 40mm northbridge fan.

A pretty healthy mix of everything you need and a few nice extras like the Bluetooth adapter, nothing too extravagant to keep the cost to the consumer down, yet, you don’t need to purchase anything else to use the motherboard to its fullest. We feel the option of a wireless '54g' adapter instead of the Bluetooth would have been nice though.