Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH achieved an excellent performance on our tests.

Its on-board video (Intel 945G, based on the new Intel GMA 950 engine) showed to be a good evolution over its predecessor, Intel i915G (Intel GMA 900).

The compatibility with ViiV technology, the excellent amount of features for a motherboard from this category (Gigabit Ethernet LAN, eight-channel audio with independent outputs, coaxial SPDIF input and output and Firewire port) together with its great manufacturing quality make Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH an excellent low cost option for those willing to build a home multimedia center to watch movies, to transfer and edit videos from your digital camcorder, to transfer and edit pictures from your digital camera, to access the Internet, to edit audio, etcetera.

Even though its video power isn’t enough to run the latest games like Far Cry and Half Life 2 – keeping in mind that digital home PCs aren’t targeted to such application –, the good news is that installing a real video card on GA-8I945GMH-RH it will deliver an excellent performance. Thus you can easily transform this motherboard into an excellent gaming machine.

The only drawback we saw for GA-8I945GMH-RH was its total lack of overclocking options, so you won’t be able to use it to explore all the overclocking potential of Pentium D 805, which is a low-cost CPU that has a great overclocking capability. On the other hand, we need to keep in mind that this motherboard was developed to be used on digital home PCs, a market segment where users may not even know what overclocking is.

Of course there are cheaper socket 775 with on-board video available at the market, but no other offers the same amount of features and the performance level brought by Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH at the same time.