Dear Guru's, Gigabyte core business; among many other products, is making mainboards for Intel and AMD based platforms. They have been doing just that for quite a while now with an amount of success that is just mind boggling. They are now one of the major Taiwanese electronics manufacturers that produce all kinds of hardware from Taiwan to America to Europe. No matter where you look, you'll probably be able to buy a Gigabyte product anywhere these days.

Mainboard Features
It's been a while now since Intel released its mainboard chipset 865PE chipset. What I did not expect at the time of it's release was how popular this chipset was going to be for this industry. Intel designed an extremely fast and flexible chipset that made quite a few mainboard manufacturers happy. See, the trick is to get the optimal combination of hardware and since the 865/875 chipsets support Pentium 4's with 800 MHz FSB and Dual Channel DDR with an extremely fast memory bandwidth the combo is mighty and powerful.

One of the manufacturers that's using this Intel chipset is Gigabyte. Today's product review is their high-end, feature rich and definitely amazing GA-8IPE1000 Pro2-W. With key features managed by Intel's 865PE/ICH5 chipset, and P4 Socket 478 Pentium4 Prescott ready, Wireless LAN (11 MBit/s), Gigabit LAN, 4x DDR400 Dual Channel, AGP 8x, 2x Serial ATA, FireWire and 8x USB 2.0; this mainboard is dressed to impress !

The GA-8IPE1000 Pro2-W is part of Gigabyte's P4 Titan series and  this mainboard is next to it's Gigabit network Intel PRO/1000 CT solution adding Wireless LAN to it. This is handled through a IEEE 802.11b compliant and Wi-Fi compatible GN-WBZB-M USB wireless LAN card, You hook up the little add-on towards an internal USB connector, install some software and bam .. 11 Mbit/s Wireless now belong to your options. As it is an USB add-on you can buy the product as a kit also, look on Gigabyte's website for GN-WBZB-M.

Let's look at the most important specifications and features: