Verdict: Noisy and expensive, but very fast and incredibly overclockable

As described last month, this Gigabyte board could well be a missing prop from a 'Star Trek' movie, thanks to its blue warp nacelle-like VRM (voltage regulation module) coolers.

The GA-G1975X is based on the Intel 975X chipset, so it can run a single graphics card in 16x PCI-E mode, or two graphics cards in 8x PCI-E mode in CrossFire. Unfortunately, Intel and Nvidia still won't play nicely together, so the 975X chipset doesn't currently support SLI. The GA-G1975X's PCB is dominated by the blue wind tunnels that funnel air over the VRMs. Despite the crowded PCB, the high-speed PCI-E slots are widely spaced apart. Unfortunately, the space between the PCI-E slots is filled by the two PCI slots, which means that one PCI slot will be obscured if you install a CrossFire setup using cards with dual-slot coolers.The four 40mm fans that cool the VRMs also make a hell of a racket, as they aren't speed-controlled. The funnels can also make it difficult to mount large CPU HSFs.

The Intel ICH7R Southbridge provides four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, but only a single EIDE channel. The GA-G1975X also has eight USB 2 and two FireWire ports, two 4x PCI-E slots, and optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs for its Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit on-board sound chip. This is arguably better than HD Audio, as it supports Creative's EAX Advanced HD positional surround-sound technology.

The BIOS allows you to send 1.75V to the CPU, an additional 0.35V to the Northbridge and an extra 1.75V to the DDR2 RAM. During testing, the GA-G1975X was able to max out our test CPU, a 3GHz Pentium D, by raising its FSB to 255MHz, which resulted in a clock frequency of 3.83GHz.

As both of the 975X-based boards perform better out of the box and overclock more than motherboards based on the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition and nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipsets, a 975X-based motherboard will allow you make the most of your Pentium 4 or Pentium D. Unfortunately, you could buy two CrossFire motherboards for the price of one 975X motherboard. That said, if you can afford a high-end Intel CPU then spending £175 on a motherboard probably doesn't seem all that crazy.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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