Review of Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2L Motherboard

This small basic motherboard was the perfect inexpensive replacement for an older dead one. Got it plus AMD Sempron LE-1150 plus 1GB of memory for approx €100.

We recently had an old Athlon motherboard die on us. It was a toss up between buying a dirt-cheap Vostro desktop from Dell or reusing all the existing components whilst replacing the core MB+CPU.

View image

I used dabs.com in the UK and bought the cheapest decent MB I could find. This Gigabyte really is a complete bargain if you have non-gfx intensive business needs. A summary of its features are as follows:

• AMD Sempron, Athlon 64 and AM2+ CPU Support
• Up to DDR2-800 Ram (2x Slots)
  
• SATA up to 3Gbs (2x connectors)
• 1x IDE
• 1x Floppy
  
• 10/100 LAN built-in
• NVidia NForce 405 Chipset
• NVidia GeForce 6100 graphics built-in
• Realtek built-in audio
  
• 1 PCI-E Slot for add-on graphics card
• 2x PCI slot
  
• 6x USB 2.0 (with add-on cable/backplate)

What was particularly useful about the motherboard was that I just pulled out the old one from the PC, replaced it with the new one, rebooted Windows 5 or 6 times as it installed driver support for the new hardware and then we were back in business on the PC as if nothing had changed (apart from a speed increase with the new CPU).

The only downsides really are having 2 PCI slots, one IDE and no Gigabit Ethernet but we don't actually need more slots and this particular PC is on a wireless LAN connection. The single IDE is a pain however since the main HDD is IDE (secondary is SATA) and we need one for the DVD burner too. However I had a PCI expansion card with both IDE and SATA on it which I got on eBay for a few Euro and that worked perfectly.

If you need a new business motherboard or a speedboost on an aging machine, you won't go wrong with this selection.