Rating: 20%
Review Title: Bailed out on me within a week!
Comment by Kmoscrop at 11:13pm 25th October 2008
Verdict: This was promising to be a really nice motherboard. I have read reviews here and there and people seem to be getting on well with it. But it didn't last long enough for me to be able to enjoy it. I'd avoid this motherboard if I were you, I didn't expect Gigabyte to produce bad hardware but they have, this mobo proves it. My advice is to research long and hard into mobo's before you leap in and purchase one. They can be very tempremental and can sometimes be the root of many problems and decide whether a system is built or bust.
I am now looking to the highly rates Asus P5Q range for a possible replacement.
I purchased this board a week or so back for my new system that I am building. I connected it up and all was as said on the descriptions on the box and after a few problems constructing it all together (as is always the way with a new system) it got going. It seemed to boot and load windows very well. I then went onto overclock my Q6600 to 3.0ghz with little problem and had the Ballistix Tracer memory (4gb of it) running at stock speed nicely. All was well, I was able to game on top settings with cracking frame rates and with little or no hiccups. But then (and this is a big but, I was happily gaming away one day and the PC started to become unstable. I suffered random lockups and blue screens. I thought nothing of it at first just updating drivers and tweaking settings. I then a few days ago was playing CoD4 which crashed to blue screen and then rebooted the PC. The PC rebooted, again and again..........and then again and again and so on. It was stuck in a reboot loop; and before the bios screen was displayed too. I thought it was probably the CMOS settings going haywire as Gigabyte boards tend to restart and not allow bootup when overclocking has gone too far. So I cleared the CMOS and still it booted again and again with no respite. So a started to detach the components one by one until I was left with nothing more than the PSU, Processor and Mobo (It wouldn't boot with any type of memory so that was eliminated too). It still would not boot. How odd I thought, so I luckily had a friend who was into computers as much as I am and tried my processor in his PC and it booted fine, no problems, that elimated that. As for the PSU its an OCZ 780w Modular and seems to be working fine. So that just leaves the Mobo. After doing a little research I have found that there are several posts on forums of people suffering from boot loop problems with no real clue as to the cause. One individual said he contacted Gigabyte and they told him it was incurable and to return the item!
So it seems to be a common problem, perhaps its something to do with the active shutdown and boot management system that Gigabyte seem to employ to protect the hardware, its just that in this instance it has protected it by rendering it totally useless.
I thought I would give it 20% as perhaps that is the percentage of people who might be able to get this Mobo to work without any flaws.
Write a review of the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4
