AOpen i915Ga-HFS Desktop Motherboard - Intel 915G Chipset - Socket PGA-479

not quite what many people need

Strengths: *only ATX board that supports 479-pin processors (namely, Pentium-M) *decent features for people who seek small, quiet PC's for multimedia, not gaming or performance(onboard sound, video, good LAN)

Weakness: *i915GMm-HFS is smaller and better for people who are not looking use it for gaming and whatnot *no onboard RAID or SATA II *virtually no after-market heatsinks fit on it! (same prob as i915GMm-HFS)

First of all, note that this is NOT an mATX board, as the basic description/title here (and on some other sites) says. This is a typical-sized ATX board. I just received it in the mail today, and so my review is just from general impressions and from the features it comes with. Whatever information there is about this board is somewhat mysterious and conflicts with some other information...
Read Full Review

First of all, note that this is NOT an mATX board, as the basic description/title here (and on some other sites) says. This is a typical-sized ATX board.

I just received it in the mail today, and so my review is just from general impressions and from the features it comes with. Whatever information there is about this board is somewhat mysterious and conflicts with some other information elsewhere.

Being curious, I decided to buy the board and see what happens. Just like the i915GMm-HFS board, the hole pattern for the heatsink on this board is 52mm x 52mm. To put it simply - only the small, light heatsink that comes in the box will fit without modification. For people who want their processor to have a long life, and especially for people who want to overclock their processor - this is a bad thing. It stays rather warm, which often causes problems like throttling. Unlike the GMm-HFS, this motherboard does not even have an onboard RAID controller.

My conclusion, thus, is this: if you want a small, quiet computer which you will not use for games, do not get this board, but get its brother, the i915GMm-HFS. It's the same thing, but also has SATA II and RAID support - plus it's smaller.

In fact, you should probably just get that board even if your goal is to overclock and achieve nice speeds and great performance. It's slightly more expensive, but it has the same features, is smaller, and has SATAII + RAID. You'd still have to modify a heatsink to get good cooling performance, though.

The only big advantage this has is that it's less cramped and has an extra PCI slot.

By CannibalisticH0b0 - Aug 18, 2005

AOpen i915Ga-HFS ATX Pentium M Motherboard

Despite the well publicized popularity of the Pentium M on the desktop platform, there are surprisingly few consumer desktop boards with the unique Socket 479 that supports it. One company, AOpen, has been responsible for most of these boards. The i915Ga-HFS is their latest, probably their most conventional Socket 479 desktop board yet. <p> <p>It's a high performance, full-ATX design based on the...
Read Full Review

By silentpcreview.com - Nov 30, -0001