I love this little motherboard. It is cheap, supports modern LGA775 CPUs and has all the essential peripherals for building a budget PC or home theater PC. It is rock solid stable with just enough overclocking and underclocking features. Most importantly, it has DVI and HDMI ports. This is VERY rare in this class of motherboard. I cannot understand why motherboard manufacturers skip these ports and put VGA connectors only. In most motherboards, you have to put in an external card to get a digital monitor signal which defeats the purpose of the on-board integrated G41 graphics.
While on the G41 subject, this chipset is great for DVD decoding, but forget Blu-ray. While it does MPEG2 and VC1, it does not do AVC/H.264 decoding which is a very common codec for Blu-rays. If you play Blu-rays, your CPU pegs at 100% and the video stutters. I suppose you could put in a quad-core, but again that defeats the purpose of a low-power (quiet) HTPC.
Another "feature" of the G41 chipset is that it uses the older ICH7 southbridge. What that means is that this uses the last Intel chipset to natively support IDE ports, floppy, etc. While you may not care about PATA (IDE), the only motherboards I've found with rock-solid emulation/mapping of SATA to PATA are ICH7 motherboards. This is important because a lot of system utilities, flash BIOS, imaging, recovery, utilities, etc., boot from CD-ROMs and need the old legacy port mapping. This motherboard flawlessly runs every OS and utility (from like the past 10 years) that I have thrown at it.
Finally, I had no problems with audio over HDMI to my Denon receiver as long as you don't plan on running more than 5.1. None of the Intel chipsets will do this (and I don't think even ATI or nVidia will either) except for just a handful of the very latest cards or the just-released i3, i5 CPUs with integrated GPU.
In short, this is a great little motherboard for any low-mid usage.
Get more detail about Gigabyte G41M-ES2H Intel LGA775 MAX-8GB DDR2 mATX PCIE16 3PCI.
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