4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great inexpensive motherboard for Hackintoshing on OS X 10.7, Mar 4 2012
By computerman22 - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 LGA 1155 Intel H61 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (Personal Computers)
I bought this board, along with an Intel i3 CPU, to build a Hackintosh server running Mac OS X 10.7. I wanted to use the internal graphics on the board, but my CPU only supports Intel HD2000 graphics (but the board supports Intel HD3000 as well, which will work with 10.7), which are, unfortunately, not supported by Lion at this time. I had to chip in an extra $30 for a graphics card, and after that the OS worked fine. Since it's a storage server, all four SATA ports on the board are currently in use. I know a lot of other reviewers have had problems with the graphics card blocking the SATA ports, but I installed an EVGA GeForce 8400GS and still have access to all four of my SATA ports with no issues. I don't have much else to say about this motherboard besides that it's a great, inexpensive, entry-level motherboard, and it works well with OS X Lion without very much tinkering.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Step 1: Buy this MB; Step 2: ???; Step 3: Prosper, May 2 2012
By Greg Maron - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 LGA 1155 Intel H61 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (Personal Computers)
For $55, this really is a great motherboard. I have purchased many.
It the basic H61 chipset for Sandy Bridge 1155 CPUs. Put a Core i3 in this. Not some fancy-schmancy Core i5 or i7. If you need that kind of power buy a more feature-filled board (and dont forget the SSD). This board is for people that need to build a cheap, long-lasting desktop for office work, productivity, occasional gaming, or a web-surfing PC. It is able to do onboard Intel graphics, has legacy ports for keyboard & mouse, and enough USB ports for most usage scenarios. You can cram 8GB of RAM in it for like $50 nowadays, and it can even take a PCIe 16x for when lil Johnny mows enough lawns to save up and buy Skyrim. It also Facebooks real good.
There is nothing wrong with the placement of the ports
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great little mobo, May 14 2012
By Peruggia - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 LGA 1155 Intel H61 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (Personal Computers)
The first thing anyone would want to do when considering buying this motherboard would be to check for a CPU support list so that you can get everything you want to out of the CPU. You can go to Gigabyte's website for that.
Now, with that said, I love this little motherboard! I've been trying to build my first decent gaming PC, and decided that buying a cheaper motherboard now and then springing for a much more expandable MB later would be the best thing for me to do, even if it is just meant for the average consumer. I've put a number of parts in it that really dwarf this little thing, a Hyper 212 Plus being one of them. There's enough room for limited expansion, if you need to go on the cheap side like I did. I was able to save up enough money i5 3570k, and I can say that this board also supports Intel HD 4000 graphics as well.
I wish it was still just a little bit bigger, but at less than $60 dollars it's hard to complain. I'll be able to fit a dual slot GPU, but it will cut off the access to the other 2 PCIe x1 slots, but again, I can hardly complain.
Right now all I can access is the bios (I still need the money for the hard and disk drives), but everything is running fine from what I can see. I'll be sure to update this review when I can actually delve further in to the performance of this board, but right now it's nearly perfect.