Gigabyte GA-71XE4

The Gigabyte GA71XE4 motherboard is another very good and under rated product from a good manufacturer. This board is well laid out and is very easy to set up and the chip is situated so it is easy to attatch the fan, this is a problem on some boards when in place in the case. The board has 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots and one AGP as well as 3 DIMM slots which will take over 750MB of sdram pc 133or pc100. The board has 2 usb sockets built in and also more available by adding an extra cable and fitting. It is obviously ATX format but you need the larger Athlon cases to fit it in. It supports UDMA 33/66 and upto 1ghz processor (with the bios flash}. The only problem ...  Read the complete review

A very reasonably priced board which is easy to set up and get running. It has sufficient free space around the CPU socket for larger heatsinks, and in general everything is well laid out. BUT - and this may be a big but to you - it will not work properly with USB devices under Windows 98 SE. The problem is simply that Windows will not detect any USB devices that are plugged in on startup; you have to unplug and replug them to get them to work. As far as I can ascertain there are no patches available. I bought my board from a fairly large dealer who admitted that this was a known problem, but unfortunately I could not return it for a refund since technically the ...  Read the complete review