Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H Review

In response to the growing demands from all segments of society, Gigabyte has developed a new line of motherboards known as the S-series. The “S” incorporates five elements, namely Safe, Smart, Speed, SLI and Silent-Pipe. Not all the boards have all the elements implemented, which is why Gigabyte has four different levels of motherboards, which are S2, S3. S4 and S5. In this article, we look at the lowest end of the S-series spectrum - the GA-73PVM-S2H.

The review sample that we received from Gigabyte was most probably manufactured fairly recently, as the box was quite bare save a pair of SATA cables, a floppy cable and an IDE cable. There wasn’t even a manual and the driver CD didn’t even have a cover design. Hopefully, a full bundle would be provided in the future.

The motherboard is an S2 unit, so it only implements the Safe and Smart features. The Safe features include extra protection of the BIOS settings, hardware design, a monitoring system, recovery software, etc. The Smart feature comprises of Gigabyte’s various proprietary software that manages the BIOS and driver settings. Moving on to the board itself, the PCB is based on the MicroATX form factor, meaning fewer components. We see only two DIMM slots rather than the usual four. They support memory running at 800MHz or less and a maximum of 4GB of RAM. In terms of storage, the board has the regular IDE and floppy ports, and three SATA ports, which is quite unusual as most boards come with even numbers of ports. Being a budget board, it doesn’t come as a surprise when only one PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots are available. Fortunately, the x1 slot is above the x16 one, so you won’t have to worry about it being blocked. Even though the board is considered low-end, it was pleasant to know that the board has a FireWire port as well as an eSATA port. Last but not least, you get a D-sub port, a DVI port and a HDMI port, thanks to the nForce 630i chipset; the last two ports are integrated with HDCP.

For our benchmark, we used an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor, a pair of A-Data 512MB DDR2-1200 memory and an MSI 8800GTS card. In PCMark, the board scored 7,496 for CPU while the memory test churned out 5,764. The graphics test gave a figure of 11,395, with HDD giving 5,453. Overall, PCMark awarded the board with 8,059, a pretty good score.

The GA-73PVM-S2H is a cheaper solution that can satisfy everyday computing needs. If you’re a budget gamer or a HTPC newbie, this would be one of the options to consider.

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