On the storage side, GA-8I945GMH-RH provides one ATA-100 port and four SATA-300 ports, all controlled by Intel 82801GDH (ICH7-DH) south bridge. These ports support Intel Matrix Storage technology, NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10).
Since there are no extra standard (parallel) IDE ports, you cannot install more than two parallel IDE devices on this motherboard.
This motherboard comes with an orange SATA cable (which has a latch) and a blue 80-wire IDE cable.
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Figure 4: Four SATA-300 ports.
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Figure 5: Cables that come with Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH.
On the networking side, it comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by Intel Vidalia 82573L chip, which is connected directly to the PCI Express bus.
This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio (7.1 format) produced by the south bridge with the help of Realtek ALC882 High Definition Audio codec. It has individual outputs for each channel (front, side, rear, center and subwoofer) and coaxial SPDIF input and output soldered on the motherboard.
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Figure 6: Connectors found on the motherboard.
It also has eight USB 2.0 ports (four soldered on the motherboard and four available through an I/O bracket) and three FireWire (IEEE 1394a) ports controlled by Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip (one in regular size soldered on the motherboard rear and two available through an I/O bracket, which doesn’t come with the board).
Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH comes with a CD-ROM containing drivers, motherboard utilities and Norton Internet Security 2006 OEM.
