Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R and ECS GF9300TA Review Articles

I've been curious these past days about what cost-effective motherboards are out there so I decided to surf for P45 motherboards again. I hit paydirt:

HotHardware.com's review of the Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R


This is the cheapest P45 motherboard that I've found so far that offers DDR3 support. HotHardware even gave it a "Recommended" award. It also features Crossfire support (which is a major bummer to me, since I prefer Nvidia cards).


I've also found an Nvidia-based motherboard, the ECS GF9300TA.


Guru3d.com's review of the ECS GF9300TA


While it doesn't support DDR3 since "the motherboard has only DDR2 sockets" according to


HardwareSecrets.com's review of the ECS GF9300T-A,


it does have a built-in video solution in the form of the GF9300 mGPU. While this may not seem to be something to write home about, you can enhance your PC's gaming performance by using an add-on video card while using the integrated one as a PhysX processor. Now that's awesome!