Gigabyte's AMD 780G has a surprisingly small heatsink, while on the other hand, its MCP78S board comes with a rather large one. The M78SM-S2H, as the MCP78S based board from Gigabyte will be known as, has a range of other quite interesting features, though, and this might end up being cheaper than the MA78GM-S2H, as the MCP78S is a mid-range IGP chipset.

The board still has HDMI, DVI and a D-sub connector, but has to make to with a coaxial S/PIDF out instead of optical and it doesn't have FireWire or eSATA. Gigabyte has only opted for 5.1-channel audio connectors, although it should be able to do DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD via the HDMI or S/PDIF connector. Gone is also the PS/2 mouse port and it has been replaced by two USB 2.0 ports, and there are a further two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and a parallel port on the board, as well.

In terms of slots, it's not that different from the AMD 780G board, as it has one x16 PCIe 2.0 slot, one x1 PCIe slot and two PCI slots, six SATA connectors, and finally, headers for a further eight USB 2.0 ports. The only downside is that it only has two memory slots, although as the memory controller is located in the AMD CPU, it still supports dual channel.

We don't have a launch date on this board, but we'd expect it to be available sometime in February unless Nvidia changes its launch plans.