Gigabyte G41M-ES2L Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Near the Intel ICH7 southbridge we can see four SATA-300 ports, which is important even in basic motherboards, because nowadays almost any computer uses one SATA port for the hard disk drive and another for the optical drive, and if the motherboard has only two ports, you cannot install any other drive (PATA drives are virtually extinct, at least at stores).

Unfortunatly ICHR7 southbridge has no RAID support, but to be honest, this feature is only used on more advanced (and expensive) systems. SATA ports, as you can see in Figure 5, are well positioned, so a long video card will not block them.

Figure 5: SATA ports.

The audio section of G41M-ES2L is produced by the chipset, with the aid of a Realtek ALC888B codec, with 10 (7.1+2) channels and 97 dB signal-noise ratio (SNR) on analog outputs. SNR on analog inputs is of 90 dB, a good grade for a value motheboard, but not for professional audio capture applications, which demands at least 95 dB SNR here. The rear panel audio connectors are shared, which means you cannot use six-channel outputs and microphone/line-in inputs at the same time, which is a shame. There is no SPDIF outputs, also.

The board has eight USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on rear panel and four available as internal headers. On-board LAN is a Gigabit Ethernet, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111 chip.

The rear panel is simple and traditional: mouse and keyboard PS/2 connectors, one parallel and one serial ports, on-board VGA video output, four USB 2.0 ports, one Ethernet RJ-45 connector and shared audio jacks.

Figure 6: Rear panel.