Gigabyte GA -G1975X won a Silver at the PC Format awards

This Gigabyte board could well be a missing prop from Star Trek movie, thanks to its blue warp nacelle-like VRM(voltage regulation module) coolers. The GA-G1975X is based on the Intel chipset, so its capable of running a single graphics card in 16x PCI-E mode, or two graphics cards in 8x PCI CrossFire mode. Unfortunately Intel and NVIDIA still haven't decided to play nicely together, so the 975X chipset doesn't currently support SLI.The GA-G1975X's PCB is dominated by the blue wind tunnels that funnel air over the VRM's. Despite the crowded PCB, the high speed PCI-E slots are widely spaced apart .Unfortunately, the space between the PCI-E slots is filled by the two PCI slots, which means that you wont beable to install any PCI cards, such as a Creative X-Fi, if you have two graphics cards in CrossFire mode.

The four 40mm fans that cool the VRM's also make a hell of a racket, as they're not speed-controlled. The funnels can also make it difficult to mount large CPU HSF's.

The Intel ICH7R Southbridge provides four RAID-capable SATA II ports, but only a single EIDE channel. The GA-G1975X also has eight USB 2.0 and two FireWire ports, two 4x PCI-E slots, and both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs for its Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit onboard sound chip. This is arguably better than HD Audio, as it supports Creative EAX Advanced HD positional surround sound technology.

The BIOS allows you to send 1.75V to the CPU, an additional 0.35V to the Northbridge and an extra 1.75V to the DDR2 RAM. During testing, the GA-G1975X was able to max out our test CPU, a 3GHz Pentium D by razing its FSB to 255MHz, which resulted in a clock frequency of 3.83GHz.

As both of the 975X-based motherboards perform better out of the box and overclock more than motherboards based on the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition and nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, a 975X-based motherboard will allow you to make the most of your Pentium 4 or Pentium D.