Features mean everything from components on the motherboards to things seen in the BIOS. The ASUS P5QEM is the best of all the boards when it comes down to just features. It comes with good BIOS with a lot that overclockers will like. Sensible incre¬ments and options to alter speeds and voltage for all the components is a God sent with this board. For a board that costs Rs 8,375, these are some of the features that are found in the high-end boards from ASUS and some other brands. Another board with similar overclocking features is the Gigabyte EG43M-S2H. The board also doesn't come with a PS2 port for the mouse, so you need to use a USB mouse or get a PS2 to USB convertor.
The Zotac GeForce 9300 board - although very good in performance, as you'll soon find out - is good, but the BIOS is rather boring. The BIOS is extremely basic with the absolute least amount of overclockability options and features. As for the features that are available, they just aren't prac¬tical. The huge voltage increments are an example of this. If you were planning on overclocking a lot, then this
board is definitely a very bad idea. What it lacks in BIOS features, it makes up in the features on the board itself. The chip comes with a tiny fan on it, and this works well for the 9300. Typically, we've seen that the 9300 gets pretty Gigabyte EG43M-S2H is a complete hot when you're playing games. board when it comes to features.Like some of the boards, VGA, DVI and even HDMI are available. The microATX form factor along with the various display connectivity options makes it a good HTPC board. The MSI P7NGM and the ECS GF9300T-A are also very similar with the number of features. The MSI P7NGM like the ZOTAC too hardly has any overclocking features built into the BIOS. It looks very similar to the ZOTAC board, but this one doesn't come with a fan on top of the heat¬sink; it uses solid state capacitors though. It has a clean design with the SATA ports positioned away from the PCI Express graphics card slot.
The ECS GF9300T-A is no different from the other two 9300 boards either. The one thing that makes it stand out is the ALC889-based audio solution. The only other board with a different audio solution was the ASUS P5QEM with the Realtek ALC1200 chip. All the motherboards came with a single wired Gigabit LAN port. NVIDIA's HybridSLI and HybridPower allows external graphic cards to work better with the motherboard, both to save power as well as improve performance, but this works only for NVIDIA graphics cards.
In order to be future-proof, memory expandibil¬ity is important, and only the ZOTAC GeForce 9300 and the Intel P5QEM can handle 16 GB of DDR2 so far. The MSI G43M2 board only comes with two RAM slots. None of the boards we received for the Intel platform supported DDR3 RAM or CrossFire, or even SLI.