Intel announces DDR333 Chipsets: 3-way 845PE shootout

Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra: Board Layout

The Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra was laid out pretty well, with only a few minor issues that we could see.

Thankfully, Gigabyte places the ATX (20-pin) connector on the right side of the motherboard. It's located high enough on the motherboard (towards the top of the DIMM slots) so that the ATX cables aren't clogging the middle of your computer case. The ATV12V line isn't placed where we like though. It's placed all the way over at the left portion of the motherboard near the I/O ports. As with the Albatron and ASUS motherboards, you'll first have to unhook the ATX12V line if you want to uninstall your HSF, which is just another unnecessary hassle to deal with. But like we said before, the vast majority of P4 motherboards place the ATX12V line this close to the I/O ports, so Gigabyte isn't alone in this matter.

This time the placement of the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors is good, right above the AGP slot, whereas Albatron's 845PE board placed the connectors below the AGP slot (which greatly restricted the length you could stretch the IDE cables as well as the maximum allowable air flow).

The placement of the DIMM connectors on the Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra isn't too thoughtful either. This location will most likely force you to uninstall your video card if you want to add more memory to your system. This is yet another layout problem similar to that of the Albatron PX845PEV Pro and ASUS P4PE.

The rest of the 8PE667 Ultra's layout was good as well. The USB 2.0 headers were placed towards the very bottom of the board, which is the optimal position to place them because the wires from a USB 2.0 bracket won't collide too badly with other PCI cards installed. In addition, the center of your case won't be cluttered with any extra wires because the USB 2.0 headers are placed at the bottom of the board, not towards the middle where a lot of other motherboard makers like to place them.