Intel Media Series DG33TL

This is a review of the Intel Media Series DG33TL motherboard. Please keep reading for an in-depth analysis, including an overview of the board itself and how well it performs under testing.
Intel has been making motherboards longer than almost anyone else and dominates the motherboard market. So why do we see ASUS, ABIT, and others leading the way for motherboards? Intel motherboards typically aren’t sold very much, outside of the OEM manufacturers such as Dell and HP. Intel does sell their chipset to third parties that develop both kick ass, and not so kick ass, motherboards.

Still, Intel does manage to release a few motherboards to retail, and that is what we have today. Intel motherboards are known to be solid and stable. What they lack is customizability in areas such as frequencies and voltage. This makes them difficult to overclock. Today we have the Intel Media Series DG33TL. We'll see if it acts like a typical Intel motherboard.



This is a review of the Intel Media Series DG33TL motherboard. Please keep reading for an in-depth analysis, including an overview of the board itself and how well it performs under testing.
Intel has been making motherboards longer than almost anyone else and dominates the motherboard market. So why do we see ASUS, ABIT, and others leading the way for motherboards? Intel motherboards typically aren’t sold very much, outside of the OEM manufacturers such as Dell and HP. Intel does sell their chipset to third parties that develop both kick ass, and not so kick ass, motherboards.

Still, Intel does manage to release a few motherboards to retail, and that is what we have today. Intel motherboards are known to be solid and stable. What they lack is customizability in areas such as frequencies and voltage. This makes them difficult to overclock. Today we have the Intel Media Series DG33TL. We'll see if it acts like a typical Intel motherboard.
Under that massive heatsink in the middle of the board is the G33 Express Chipset. It has Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 graphics with Clear Video Technology. For gaming this won’t even come close to playing moderate games on any decent settings or resolution.

The video is outputted from either DVI or VGA. Sadly, the motherboard doesn’t have any HDMI support. For a media-centered motherboard, this is something that should have been added. Compared to the offerings from nVidia and AMD, this is a weak graphics card.

After the whole nVidia 680i ordeal with the new quad core CPUs, it’s nice to see a motherboard that will be a little future proof. This chipset will support at least any CPU that comes out in 2008.
As always we start at the CPU socket. I’ve seen more room, and I’ve seen less room. I’m worried about the areas on the north side of the socket, and the west a little. I would hold off getting an aftermarket cooler unless it’s simple and small.
We have four memory slots here for DDR2. They are far enough away that they won’t have any conflict with the CPU cooler. Even the bigger heatsinks for RAM should fit fine in this board. It may be difficult to install the 24-pin ATX connector with all those caps right next to it. There is no floppy support on this board, though there appears to be a spot for it. The power, rest, and LED light leads are almost halfway up the motherboard, which is a tricky place for good wire management.
I present to you the Southbridge and SATA ports. A small heatsink and lots of SATA ports are a real plus for this board. The only bad thing has to be the placement of the CMOS. With a SATA cable plugged in right next to it, clearing the CMOS becomes a tricky adventure.