Gigabyte intros an entry-level motherboard featuring Dual-UEFI BIOS
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
Gigabyte has announced a new entry-level motherboard featuring not only one UEFI BIOS, but two!
Rather late to the party, Gigabyte reluctantly adopted the UEFI BIOS when they launched their LGA2011 motherboard while most of their previous boards on LGA1155 and AM3+ sockets where still under “HybridEFI”, a workaround to its existing AwardBIOS code.
After this update however, Gigabyte proved to be innovative, combining the Dual-BIOS technology with UEFI to create Dual-UEFI, something that one can imagine being harder to implement on lower model due to the UEFI BIOS requiring higher-capacity EEPROM chips which would then stress component costs.
Gigabyte ‘ignored’ such ‘cautions’, so to speak, yet they don’t seem to have compromised anything as reveals their latest revision of the GA-H61MA-D3V (rev. 2.0), an entry-level socket LGA1155 motherboard based on the Intel H61 chipset.
Aside from the Dual-UEFI feature, the board also comes with Gigabyte’s Ultra-Durable 4 Classic component loadout, consisting of a new fiberglass fabric weave PCB that’s more resistant to humidity that causes short-circuits, high ESD-resistance ICs, anti-surge ICs located on critical circuits, low RDS (on) MOSFETs and a 100% high-grade solid-state capacitor design.
The CPU is powered by a 5-phase VRM and is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots which support up to 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory.
Expansion slots include one PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and three PCIe x1. Gigabyte has decided to leave the legacy PCI, which not only could prove to be progressive, but allows to save on the production cost of placing a PCI-PCIe bridge chip.
Storage connectivity includes two SATA 6 Gb/s ports from Marvell 88SE9172 (due to the H61 PCH lacking SATA 6 Gb/s) and four SATA 3 Gb/s ports from the PCH.
Additional connectivity includes 6-channel HD audio (Realtek ALC887), two USB 3.0 ports (EtronTech EJ168), gigabit Ethernet (Realtek 8111E) and a number of USB 2.0 ports. Display connectivity includes DVI and D-Sub
Expected for May, the GA-H61MA-D3V 2.0 will be price at around $50.
Source: TPU
