Summary: I purchased one of these boards and discovered that the RJ-45 Ethernet connector was dead, although the LED indicator light indicated it was working.
An email to the only tech support evident, which is in Taiwan, was not answered. So I returned it to the store where I had purchased it, and exchanged it for another board.
It was with some concern that I then noted that the serial number was only 4 digits removed from the previous board, and sure enough, it also had a defective Ethernet connector. A search of these boards on the Internet revealed that connector failures are common (provided the board is not completely dead to start with), but that people who managed to get a working one were generally happy with them, and since my main workhorse computer uses an older AMD socket 754 Gigabyte board which I have been well satisfied with, I decided to try a third time.
However, rather than returning the second board, I purchased another one with a radically higher serial number (which I hoped would eliminate any problems that a bad production run might have introduced with the first two boards), since it was becoming evident that Gigabyte's design and quality control were seriously lacking and I was concerned that there might be something worse wrong with the third board, in which event I could always use the second board with an old Belkin PCI network adapter card I had on hand. Because of the time and energy already wasted on this project, I tested the board on my workbench by running it in the open, sitting on its box padding, and with the various board connections hay-wired to it. It seemed to work fine, but I let it run, off and on for four days, and it continued to work OK. I then installed it in the case. And promptly discovered that the Ethernet connector had failed, despite the fact that it had been working fine on the workbench.
My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the design and construction of these boards that, if they are not already defective when they arrive from the factory, causes a failure when they experience the pressure placed on the connector housing by the spring tabs on the rear connector plate of the computer case. Whether the Ethernet connector would work again if I removed it from the case, I don't know; it is hardly worth the time to find out because obviously there are one or more bad connections on the board.
Since the manufacturers in Taiwan are not interested in providing support, and the United States Gigabyte people seem to provide no technical support, and do not even have a toll free phone number, I fear that Gigabyte motherboards are no longer the good investment that they once were. As of this posting in April 2009, the Taiwan tech support people continue to refuse email response.
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