Gigabyte 8SG667 (SiS 648): Big Power in a Small Package

Gigabyte 8SG667: Basic Features

The Gigabyte 8SG667 isn't all that feature-rich of a motherboard. There's no RAID controller, no LAN, and no FireWire to be found anywhere.

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The features that Gigabyte does decide to throw in with this board include onboard sound in the form of the Realtek ALC650 chip.

As with all SiS 648 motherboards, there's native onboard USB 2.0 support. The Gigabyte 8SG667 offers 2 rear USB 2.0 ports for your pleasure.

The I/O ports are nothing special either, offering the usual set of features; 2 PS/2 ports, 2 serial ports, one parallel port, and a Game port (where you can activate the onboard sound if you desire).

Thankfully, there's plenty of room for expansion with 5 onboard PCI slots available to the user. In addition, there are 3 DIMM slots available, supporting up to 3GB of DDR DRAM. One of most attractive features this motherboard offers is unofficial support for DDR400 memory. We'll get into DDR400 a little later…

The Gigabyte 8SG667, unfortunately, doesn't come with a dual BIOS setup like most of Gigabyte's other motherboards. Despite the small size of the board, it would have been nice to see a backup BIOS anyway.

That's about it feature-wise. However, we do see a possibility for onboard LAN with this motherboard; if you look closely you can see the solder pads for a Realtek 8100B chip. It's not all that unlikely that we'll see a version of the Gigabyte 8SG667 with onboard LAN in the future.