Gigabyte EP45-DS3 & EP45-DS3R Motherboard Reviews

“The DS3R was designed as an inexpensive essentials board and it exceeds its quota. While we cannot recommend the board for Multi-GPU purposes that doesn't mean you can't use a good single card or a GX2/X2 or the second slot for another Nvidia card for PhysX. Like any P45 if you can tweak the nuts off it the performance is exceptionally good - and the Gigabyte has plenty of options that work (!!) to do this.

For the average user, the overclocking available should suffice but it's unlikely to score the big numbers on the cheap, and while there's oodles of competition gunning for your cash around the £80-90 mark, Gigabyte doesn't necessarily seem favourably cheap on the surface compared directly to some of the competition. But when you count everything Gigabyte includes and the manner in which it is presented, for the price, it's a very well featured product.

In all, it's clearly not perfect but it does very well for itself in the meantime, so while we are adamant you can get precisely what you need given the ample variety on offer, if it does tick your boxes it should be a tempting proposition.”

“During our test session we discovered a lot of advantages that distinguish this mainboard not only from its competitors, but also from its predecessors. Among them are the “smart” BIOS that will help during overclocking, but that can be disabled if necessary. We were definitely very pleased with EasyTune 6 utility with pleasant interface and acceptable functionality. Of course, we can’t disregard a few negative changes, such as the elimination of the board’s ability to control rotation speed of fans with a three-pin power connector. Another thing I didn’t really like that much was the fact that this board turned out not as simple to configure as I would expect an entry-level mainboards to be. And even though many of you may disagree with this opinion of mine that entry-level mainboards should be simple, it is the result that matters in the end. And the result is not that promising, unfortunately. Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3 failed to overclock a dual-core processors, though coped fine with quad-core CPU overclocking.”