Intel D845GBV Motherboard

At the heart of Intel’s latest motherboard, the D845GBV, beats the i845G chipset. The D845GBV is a rather impressive motherboard that uses the ATX form factor. With six PCI slots, 1 AGP slot and 1 CNR slot the motherboard offers an uncommon upgradability. It hosts a 478 pins processor socket that can welcome Intel Celeron 1.7Ghz (or higher) as well as Intel Pentium 4 processors (including P4B with a 533 MHz FSB).  The D845GBV requires an ATX 2.03 compatible power supply. 

When unpacking the motherboard, you’ll instantly notice the huge heatsink that covers the i845G chipset. Curiously Intel has adopted a big massive iron heatsink instead of a more compact heatsink with a fan to dissipate the heat emmited by the i845G. I guess it’s sufficient enough. Near the traditional two UDMA connectors are only two DDR-SDRAM slots. Having only two memory banks is regretable since it will force you to ditch old memory sticks if ever you have to upgrade your memory. 

The back of the motherboard unveils PS/2 mouse & keyboard connectors, four USB connectors that’ll undifferently support USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 devices, one serial port, one parallel port, one VGA connector and a ramp of three mini jack audio connectors. As usual with Intel the motherboard is almost jumper free, thus the BIOS will automatically detect and configure the CPU and memory installed on the system.

The firmware of the motherboard is stored on the Intel 82802AB 4 MB Firmware Hub component ensuring it can be updated. One really good thing is that the BIOS is Multilanguage enabled so it can speak English as well as German! Updating the BIOS is a child game since Intel regularly provides Express Bios Update that runs directly under Windows. Just like every actual Intel motherboard, the D850GBV features a new unique technology named Intel Rapid Bios. This feature will surely interest every user: in order to reduce long booting time, user frustration and to increase the efficiency of today's computers, the latest generation of Intel Bios now improves boot time without sacrificing features, quality or reliability. The BIOS Power On Self Test (POST) was streamlined by parallelizing tasks, eliminating redundant code, reduction of legacy features, selective hardware usage and configuration. To reduce the boot time you can even choose to disable hard disk tests so your PC will be ready to work faster than before. Underneath is an Intel chart showing the benefits of this new technology. This technology exceeds the PC 2001 Design Specification Guide and is compliant with Microsoft Windows Me (Millennium Edition) as well as Microsoft Windows XP. 

In order to unleash the full potential of the motherboard you’ll have to install the latest Intel INF chipset drivers so Windows can identify the components used by the board. The second driver to install is Intel Application Accelerator package that consists of advanced UDMA ATA drivers that will deliver faster hard disk data transfers (increased by 15% in comparison when using Windows ones) thanks to the optimized support of the Pentium 4/Celeron data preftech. Then you need to install Intel’s graphic drivers for the integrated 3D graphics accelerator in order to get the highest framerate in your favorite games. Finally the SoundMax 3.0 drivers have to be installed so you can listen to music on your computer. Each Intel driver has been thoroughly tested to operate flawlessly with other Intel drivers in order to ensure your system is always reliable.

Intel D845GBV Motherboard