GIGABYTE GA-G33M-S2H


The white and gold combination of colours as well as the large S2 symbol on the front immediately caught our attention when we first saw the packaging for this motherboard. An attractive looking design has all the important information laid out, while the back lists the rest of the features which may also be of interest to consumers.


The inside of the box is not too shabby either. There is one IDE and one floppy disk drive cable, two SATA 3Gb/s cables, the very nice looking and clearly labeled I/O shield. Also included are the user manual and CPU installation guide, as well as the mandatory driver disk. The software included on the disk is not all that great, but it does have all the proprietary GIGABYTE applications, such as @BIOS and Q-Flash which allow for easy BIOS upgrades.


As befitting a smaller motherboard (Micro ATX - 24.4cm x 24.4cm), the G33M has a PCB packed design. This makes it perfect for HTPC's which do not have dozens of components installed, but equally so will alienate many standard PC owners.

Despite the compact design the board is well thought out with every component placed where we would expect. Both the northbridge (Intel G33 Express chipset) and the southbridge (Intel ICH9 chipset) are passively cooled, though the cooler on the northbridge is larger due to the extra heat generated by the chip. This comes into play especially when no external (PCI-e) graphics card is installed as then the load of rendering falls onto the integrated GMA3100 graphics accelerator. The rest of the layout is standard, save for perhaps only three SATA connectors.  Our only concern with the overall design is that larger graphics cards such as the GeForce 8800GTX will not fit easily and use of low profile drive cables will be required. There may also be concerns with any cards that have larger components on the rear as the memory slots are very close to the PCB.

Speaking of memory, those of you following the market are probably aware that the G33 Express chipset supports DDR3. GIGABYTE decided to skip that part of the specification, so the motherboard only accepts DDR2 800 modules. This is especially surprising, since the FSB supports all three standard speeds, that being 1333/1066/800MHz. On the bright side, this means that practically every 775 socket CPU is supported, including the recently released 45nm cores.


As far as this motherboard is concerned, the good stuff lies hidden at the rear. If we deal with the data connectors first: four USB 2.0 connectors, one IEEE 1394a Firewire port, an eSATA 3Gb/s port (making the total number of SATA connectors four), a 1Gbps LAN port and of course two PS/2 ports (mouse and keyboard). Next, audio: six 3.5mm jacks cover all the bases for full 7.1 audio (using the onboard ALC889A chip). Now comes the really good stuff, there is an optical S/PDIF connector located beside the two USB and the Firewire port and plenty of video options. There are three connectors VGA, DVI and HDMI. The latter is a very nice addition, especially considering this motherboard is aimed towards HTPCs.



Advanced users will both love and hate the BIOS features of the G33M. On one hand it allows fine-tuning of every voltage you can think of allowing for some pretty extreme overclocks, at least in theory. There is however one problem, unlike many motherboards, especially those based on nForce chipsets that allow to unlink CPU and Memory the G33M gives you almost no freedom in this area. You can leave it at auto or you can set it to 2.5x or 3x. This obviously does not leave much headroom for overclocking. That said, by dropping the multiplier from 3 to 2.5 we were able to overclock the Core 2 Duo E6700 to a respectable 3.3Ghz simply by upping the FSB clock, dropping the memory multiplier and allowing the BIOS to optimize the voltages automatically.