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Abit AN78GS Motherboard
A Closer Look:
The installation went relatively smoothly as the ATX form factor allowed for sufficient spacing. The included driver CD installed roughly half of the drivers on Windows XP via the front GUI and each of the remaining devices required right-clicking on each unknown device and allowing the system to look for drivers, with the CD in the tray.The board is well-organized, being that all sockets are easily accessible. There should be no issue in regards to a socket being difficult to reach, or otherwise crammed up against the side of the case.
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| CPU and Sink installed | PCI ports |
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| Video card installed | RAM installed |
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An appreciative feature of this product is the Silent OTES heat-pipe design, which helps to cool the board's chip set.
The AN78GS supports surround sound audio via an onboard chip set as well as several other ports for various devices. The onboard video chip set supports NVidia GeForce 8200 graphics, which includes a Hybrid technology which will allow you to use this chip set alongside a separate NVidia graphics card in SLI, though it appears to only support the following two models: 8400GS and 8500GT, of which the latter should allow for your graphics performance to be equitable to a single GeForce 8600 graphics card, per Abit's claims.
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| Exterior ports |
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The case plate is a snug fit with the motherboard ports and does not allow the USB ports to easily slide in, but it is not difficult to work around this. Additionally, I don't have any tools to snip off the tabs that originally blocked the LAN and HDMI ports, thus I left them folded up.
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