This decision does not seem to have affected the sales of Gigabyte motherboards and it also goes to show that while innovative overclocking options can garner the accolades, the majority of PC users run their CPUs at the default speed. It is here where Gigabyte boards offer exceptional quality, performance and stability and make an excellent choice for most users.

The Gigabyte GA-6OXM7E motherboard is based on the i815E chipset and shares many characteristics with previous Gigabyte offerings. It has hardware features to spare, but stays well away from adding many overclocking options to either the system BIOS or the board itself. Even so, the engineers over at Gigabyte have included a few innovative features that will likely appease the tweaking and overclocking crowds as well.

Being an upgrade from the powerful BX chipset, the 815E promises excellent performance, as well as including a current feature set to boot. This is simply what many Intel buyers have been clamoring for: a reasonable transition from the Intel BX without losing either performance or SDRAM support. On paper at least, the i815E certainly answers these demands and even one-ups the VIA Apollo Pro 133A in a few important areas.

The i815E includes support for 66, 100 and 133 MHz front-side bus (FSB) speeds, and gives fans of the 133 MHz FSB Pentium III processors a viable alternative to the Apollo Pro 133/A. It also supports a dedicated AGP 4X slot, along with ATA 33, 66 and 100 standards. As far as upgrade options, the i815E has support for AGP, PCI, CNR and ISA slots, though including these options is at the discretion of the motherboard manufacturer.

The i815E also supports asynchronous memory speeds, though this only kicks in when using the 133 MHz FSB. The default memory speed is 100 MHz for all processors, though this can be increased up to 133 MHz when using one of the supported Pentium III models. The default CPU package for the i815E is FC-PGA and Slot 1 is not supported under the Intel specifications.

In addition to this feature list, Intel has also added a few business amenities to the i815E mix. Although the chipset fully supports a dedicated AGP slot, there is also an on-board 2D/3D option for those so inclined. Performance will suffer, but the cost savings will be enticing to many business system designers. Like the i810 before it, the i815E can be fitted with an optional 4 MB display cache to speed up performance. If you are looking to make use of the on-board video capabilities, then selecting a motherboard with the 4 MB display cache is recommended. There is also an on-board sound option using the AC'97 codec. In addition, the i815E also supports quad USB ports and the CNR specification. CNR is similar to the previous AMR specification and uses low-cost add-in cards for modem, audio and LAN capabilities (or combinations).