14 DAY TRIAL // Since most people don't have a fortune to spend on PC components, Gigabyte has decided to launch an entry-level motherboard in time for the winter holiday shopping season.
The name of the new motherboard is B75M-D2V. As is quite easy to see form the name, the platform is powered by Intel's B75 chipset.
This is the low-end Panther Point chipset, which means that the B75M-D2V is not all that powerful, but sells for much less than other motherboards we've seen. People should find it for less than $60, or 47-60 Euro.
The LGA 1155 socket (3+1+1 phase VRM, 4-pin PSU connector) can welcome Intel Core Series, Pentium and Celeron “Sandy Bridge” or “Ivy Bridge” central processing units.
Two DIMM memory slots are wired to the CPU, directly, making 16 GB the top capacity that can be installed (DDR3 random access memory / RAM).
Since we are on the subject of slots, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot is available, supporting even the best add-in graphics cards from AMD or NVIDIA.
A pair of PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots are available as well, although these two are wired to the PCH (chipset) itself, not the CPU.
For storage, six SATA ports are present. Five of them are SATA II (SATA 3.0 Gbps), while the last one is a SATA III (SATA 6.0 Gbps).
Everything else is the same as on any other current-generation motherboard: legacy PS/2 mouse/keyboard combo port, a number of USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 6-channel HD audio, four USB 3.0 ports (two via headers, for the front I/O panels of desktop cases) and two video outputs (DVI and D-Sub). The UEFI BIOS can be used to enable and disable them as owners see fit.
Online and street stores should start accepting orders for the Gigabyte B75M-D2V micro-ATX motherboard soon, at which point we will finally know what the exact price is.
