Installation and BIOS

Since the Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R is a Micro ATX sized motherboard there was no trouble fitting it inside of my Thermaltake Matrix VX mid tower PC case. The connectors for the most part are laid out very well, but I did find that the IDE connection and the main ATX power connector are a bit too close to each other. I use rounded cables with the plastic boots on them making them a bit thicker that a flat IDE ribbon cable, connecting the power was a bit of a pain.

I also found that there are not enough 3-pin fan headers on the board, there are only two including the CPU fan header so there is really only one usable header.

Other than those two problems the layout of this board is actually very nice with most of the headers along the edges of the board allowing for easy access to them.

The BIOS is a bit bland, there’s only a few pages of basic options and the overclocking options are very limited. The is something called a ‘Robust Graphics Booster’ that enhances VGA graphics card bandwidth for higher performance, but I didn’t install a video card to see what if anything this really does. The layout is fairly easy to follow, but on PnP/PCI Configurations page there is only two options, they should have just added that to another page…