"Workhorse" motherboards based on 945GC by Gigabyte and Foxconn
Layout and Features
Foxconn 45CMV offers quite a small size attained due to the reduction in the number of expansion slots and DIMM slots (down to two). The developers of Gigabyte 945GCMCL have cut down almost anything, so we've got a product of super small dimensions. In fact, the size of each side of the motherboard is little bit more than the length of a memory module.
Near the CPU socket of the Foxconn board, there is a 4-pin connector to plug in a CPU cooler. Along with it, there is one connector (SYS_FAN, near the north bridge), also 4-pin. As regards the Gigabyte's board, it also has two connectors for fans. Both are 3-pin, with one of the already enabled for the CPU cooler (recall that the board has a soldered-in CPU Celeron 215).
Both the boards offer the integrated Intel GMA 950 core. However, the Foxconn board allows using an external video card which is installed into the PCI Express x16 slot.
On the 45CMV, there is also 1 PCI and one PCI Express x1 slots. Gigabyte 945GCMCL uses only one PCI slot.
To cool the north bridge, both the motherboards use only aluminum radiators without fans. Note that the CPU, the north and south bridges on the Gigabyte board are positioned on the same line. Therefore, they could have been covered with a single large radiator having a larger fan.
As we already stated, the Foxconn motherboard has merely two 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules, with the overall supported memory capacity being 4 GB. The Gigabyte's board offers less memory capacity (merely 2 GB) since there is only one slot for the memory module on.
Both the boards use the south bridge ICH7R. This chip supports four SerialATA II links, but the developers have implemented merely two. Also, ICH7 offers support for ParallelATA (one link).
As regards support for USB 2.0, the Gigabyte's board offers eight matching ports (four on the rear panel + four with brackets). On the other hand, engineers at Foxconn for some reasons have cut down the number of ports to six (two on the panel + four with brackets). Since we can't see any good reason for such a minimalization, we treat that as a shortcoming of the product.
The two boards implement the 6-channel High Definition Audio subsystem, with the ALC662 used as the codec.
The same controller is used to implement the LAN support. That is the Realtek RTL8101E chip:
The board's rear panel is of the following configuration:
For some reasons, engineers at Foxconn have given up support for the LPT port. On the contrary, at Gigabyte they have implemented this port as well as brought the second COM port over to the PCB.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
