Gigabyte motherboards have slots for memory and connectors for power and hard drives.
The Gigabyte GA-945GZM motherboard with a front-side bus speed of 1066 MHz is a low cost, all-purpose motherboard. It can be used for a basic system or, with add-on cards in the PCI slots, can be upgraded for a high-performance PC. It has a socket for Intel processors ranging from the Celeron to the Core 2 Duo and, while the native bus speed is only 800 MHz, it can reach 1066 MHz with overclocking.
Inputs / Outputs
There is one floppy connector for one floppy drive, one IDE connector for two IDE hard drives and four SATA 3 GB/s connectors. In addition to the CPU fan connector there is a connector for a system fan. For audio there is a front panel connector, a CD-in connector and a SPDIF In/Out connector. The two USB connectors are USB 1.1 or 2.0. There is also a power "on" connector and a chassis intrusion connector.
Rear Connectors
On the rear panel of the motherboard there are PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Below them are a parallel and a serial port. Next to the serial port is a VGA port for a monitor using the onboard video feature. There are four USB 1.1/2.0 sockets and one RJ45 port for the gigabit LAN cable. The onboard audio is brought out to six sockets: line in, line out, mic in, rear speaker out, center speaker out and side speaker out.
Health Monitoring and Additional Features
The motherboard has system voltage monitoring to detect abnormal voltages. The CPU temperature and fan speed are monitored and there is a system fan failure detection. There are warning signals for the temperature and the fan speed monitoring. The Gigabyte motherboard also includes "Smart" features such as fan speed control, easy BIOS and driver management and boot menu control. Safety features include hard drive S.M.A.R.T. technology and BIOS setting recovery.
Tags: hard drives, serial port, temperature speed