Gigabyte LGA 1155 Intel B75 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX DDR3 1600 Motherboards GA-B75M-D3H

My home server's motherboard recently bit the dust (Z68 chipset), and I was in search of something to replace it. Anyone who is familiar with tech knows that prices drop exponentially as it is replaced by new tech. What you forget is that it's an inverted bell curve. Towards the three or four year mark, as parts become more scarce, and prices go up exponentially. These parts are no longer being manufactured, but are still in use in many homes. So both new and old parts are scarce.I searched for a long time to find a board with similar capabilities to the Z68 that didn't cost more than a brand new current generation Z170 board. It's a little ridiculous to see four year old boards going for $200+. Supply and demand in action, folks. I was super happy to have found this board on Amazon, and reasonably priced too! This board doesn't have a ton of features, as the B75 chipset was designed more for office use.As this was for use in a home server, the number of SATA ports was important to me. And this board comes with a whopping 6 ports, which is fantastic! Only one of the ports is SATA3, which you probably want to reserve for the OS. The other ports are all SATA2, but for a server access speed is probably bottlenecked by your network anyway.One oddity is that I was unable to change my memory speed. I run this with a i2500 (non-K, locked) CPU, so I'm not sure if it is because the motherboard is incapable of changing memory speeds with a locked CPU. I've been building PCs for two decades, so either the BIOS interface is poorly designed in such a way that makes this hard to do, or this is simply not possible with the B75 chipset. My previous Z68 chipset allowed my to scale RAM speeds independently of the CPU.

I purchased this as "very good" from Warehouse Deals (Amazon's open box/used store) and it arrived in a static free bag, wrapped in bubble wrap and packed in a plain brown box. It included all the original papers, documents and software disk. It did not, however, include the IO plate for the back of the computer case. Amazon offered to send me a whole new product but I didn't feel like sending everything back for the little IO plate. Instead I contacted Gigabyte and they sent me one free of charge in just a few days. Fantastic customer support.As for the MOBO itself, I decided on this one when purchasing parts for a gaming PC build for my son. It is probably a little more than I needed but the Warehouse Deals price as around $50 so it was well worth that. I try and purchase used/open box items from Warehouse Deals as often as possible (if you check my other reviews you will see that is true!). The board has plenty of expansion slots, accommodates lots of different Intel processors and has USB 3 so I figured why not prepare for the future? I know when I start to upgrade parts of the Gaming PC I won't have to worry about space on the board or anything.As a side note: If you are building a gaming PC fro the fist time like I was don't short yourself on three main parts: Motherboard, graphics card and case. In the instance of the Motherboard, if you decide to use the PC builders version of Windows, the Windows SN links itself to the motherboard so if you ever upgrade the MOBO, you will not be able to reinstall that version of Windows on it (at least without some help from Microsoft). So just get the better MOBO to begin with and save the hassle!

This is a nice, inexpensive board if it works. I was building two identical computers, and ordered two of these mobos. The first computer worked fine, but the second showed a corrupt bios message twice, and self repaired the bios from the dual bios setup. After spending hours downloading all the usual freeware, I started getting a black screen, and when rebooting, the screen would again go black right after the welcome sign. Amazon is great about returns, and they sent me another board. The new one is completely dead, and will not respond to the power switch. Just to make sure it wasn't another component, I took the time to put the original defective board back. Same black screen after boot, so the boards are both defective. Two out of three bad.......I can't recommend these. I'll return them and order something from another manufacturer.

Its been working quite well up to this point. I bought it because of the brand and for the fat it had a good selection of PCI-E and older PCI slots on it. Something that getting harder to find these days. There are some people that still use PCI audio cards and or PCI SATA Raid cards. Another thing was it is on the list of Motherboards that work well with certain competing operating systems to the Windows and Linux platforms, the one from the fruity company. The only thing I wish is that it supported SLI. I don't use MAD/ATI graphics cards so the Crossfire solution is not for me. The SLI variant was jsut out of my price range and was simply not available anywhere. In the end its a great darn Motherboard and very stable.