Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L

Verdict: Decent overclocker at a decent price.

Finding a cheap motherboard that overclocks well is like snuffling through woodland in search of truffles - it's a hit-and-miss affair driven more by instinct than logic. Gigabyte has a certain pedigree in making cheap overclockable motherboards, though, with boards such as its excellent GA-P31-DS3L, which costs less than £50 and is able to overclock our Core 2 Duo E6700 to 3.66GHz without complaint. As this board has reached the end of its life, we hoped that the GA-EP43-SL3 would be a worthy successor.

As the model name hints, the Gigabyte is based on Intel's P43 chipset, which is paired with Intel's ICH10 Southbridge. These aren't top-of-the-range chips, so the board doesn't support RAID, and lacks sufficient PCI-E 2.0 lanes to support two graphics cards. Gigabyte has sensibly chosen not to use a FireWire controller, and there's no cooling for the VRMs.

However, other ports and headers are present in more familiar quantities. There are six S-ATA II ports, for example, with two 1x PCI-E slots and two regular PCI slots for plenty of expansion potential. As the board has EIDE and floppy connectors, you can use an old optical drive and floppy drive too. The layout didn't pose us any problems when installing our test kit and is generally well thought out.

With eight USB 2 ports on the rear I/O block, plus two headers to attach four more, you can connect a lot of devices to this board. Old mice and keyboards can connect via the two PS/2 ports, and the Realtek ALC888 audio chip provides 8-channel surround sound too. There's even a coaxial S/PDIF output if you want to avoid the Realtek chip.

Out-of-the-box performance was close to the 1,000 overall score of a fast Core 2 motherboard, which was a good start. Only the multitasking test proved to be a little too much for the Gigabyte, but this is a common failing in many motherboards. Playing Crysis at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA was no problem, with a minimum of 29fps and an average of 38fps from our Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! card.

With the stock speed results out of the way, we were itching to see if this board was another hidden treasure of an overclocker. The last Intel P43 board we looked at only managed a 400MHz maximum FSB, and the Gigabyte managed to beat this by topping out at 415MHz. This is far from the highest FSB we've seen, and limited our overclocking.

With a 415MHz FSB, we were only able to push our Core 2 Duo E6700 and its 8x multiplier from 2.66GHz to 3.32GHz. On the positive side, the BIOS is as cleanly laid out as the board, and whenever we pushed an overclock too far, the Gigabyte always recovered elegantly.

With the CPU clocked at 3.32GHz, the Gigabyte was never going to match a really good overclocking motherboard for performance. The Gimp image editing test only saw around a 78-point increase, while the CPU-intensive H.264 video encoding test saw a healthier increase of 209 points. When overclocked, the overall score of the Gigabyte rose from 947 to 1,058.

Much like the DFI Blood-Iron P45-T2RS, this board isn't an ideal partner for Core 2 CPUs with low multipliers, such as the E8200. However, many cheap CPUs use relatively high multipliers and are therefore good matches for this motherboard. The Pentium Dual-Core E2160 (which is a Core 2 Duo with slightly less Level 2 cache and a 200MHz FSB) has a multiplier of nine, for example. A maximum FSB of 415MHz therefore gives this motherboard the potential to overclock an E2160 from 1.8GHz to 3.7GHz, although we doubt that the CPU will actually run that fast.

Conclusion

The GA-EP43-S3L provides decent overclockability for its price, although the 415MHz maximum FSB limits overclocking with low-multiplier CPUs. The single graphics slot and lack of RAID support are worth remembering too, although they're sensible compromises for a budget motherboard such as this. If CrossFire support and fancy multidisk RAID 5 setups aren't your cup of tea then this board will serve you well.