Gigabyte's GA-MA78M-S2H
Gigabyte's GA-MA78M-S2H motherboard is presented in a mATX form-factor.
As such, there's a single PCIe x1 and a couple of PCIc expansion slots,
on top of the x16 PCIe for discrete graphics.
Of the six SATAII ports, one is reserved for eSATA, which it to be
found on the I/O section.
Gigabyte adds in two-port FireWire support from Texas Instruments and
Gigabit LAN from a Realtek ASIC. Realtek, too, provides the ALC889A HD
codec.
DVI and HDMI provide the digital output connections whilst D-Sub offers
an analogue output.
Designing for a mATX board requires particular attention to component
location, but, whilst undoubtedly busy, the Gigabyte's layout is clean
in most respects.
The northbridge's heatsink sits flush
with the PCIe x1 expansion slot but this shouldn't cause any
airflow-related problems as x1 PCIe cards - be they graphics or RAID -
rarely bulge far past the connector.
Hybrid action
If you choose to ignore the possibility of leveraging integrated graphics for some Hybrid action - by not activating SurroundView and CrossFire in the BIOS and driver panel, respectively - the x16 PCIe gen2 slot functions like any other.An ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 will work just as well as an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS - the board doesn't tie you into a specific manufacturer or model, of course.
As per the reference chipset, one can output video from either DVI or HDMI concurrently with VGA, but not both digital outputs at once. For example, using the HDMI along with VGA would mean that DVI is deactivated by default.
A single eSATA port makes implicit sense, and four USB2.0 and a single FireWire400 port offer decent high-speed peripheral support from the I/O section.