Gigabyte M59SLI-S5 (cont.)

Near the bottom right corner of the bard we see the Dual BIOS technology that is available only from Gigabyte. In case you ruin the main BIOS during flashing, the other chip saves the motherboard. You can also see three USB2.0 headers (predominantly yellow) for a total of six external ports. There are six native SATAII connectors (four pictured here). The two other SATAII connectors are controlled by the JMicro SATA controller. There is also a Texas Instruments Firewire controller to the left of the JMicro chip. Next to the USB headers are the brightly colored front panel connectors.



Here we can see the other two native SATA II ports not pictured earlier. There are also the PATA and Floppy connectors. Note there is only one PATA connector for two drives. Previously there were two connectors for four drives. The nF500 and RD580 chipsets now only support two PATA drives. The picture on the right is a close up of the ITE chip that monitors the temperatures and voltages of the system.

Overclocking

Like most of the other Gigabyte motherboards on the market, the user must press Ctrl + F1 to reveal the advanced tweaking settings. Without pressing that, one can only access the HyperTransport and PCI Express speeds. With that setup, we were able to achieve a maximum of 219MHz HyperTransport. This is because the HyperTransport multiplier defaults at 5x and the HyperTransport speed should be maintained at 1000MHz. Since it defaults at 5x200FSB, you must instantly lower the HyperTransport multiplier to overclock. Without Ctrl + F1 the option was not possible, but we were able to reach a measly 219MHz HTT. Once all tweaking options were revealed, the board soared to 311MHz. Any motherboard than can reach 300HTT can be considered a good overclocker. The Ctrl + F1 combination is a little annoying as every other BIOS we’ve encountered has all the options unlocked by default.