# Motherboard Gigabyte GA-B75M-D2V

## Und3i2c0v3i2

Hello guys,

I need some help. I want to buy new desktop PC, but I dont know anything about hardware, so I‘m having some dilemmas ...

I am wondering if anyone have any experince with LGA1155 B75 Gigabyte GA-B75M-D2V, PCIe/DDR3 Motherboard and gentoo?

My question is do I need a graphic card for new Gnome environment for examlple (because this MB has integrated GC) and will I be able to get all the advantages and options this MB has to offer with integrated graphic card?

This PC is just for personal use, nothing special, basically surfing, watching movies and such things (I dont need some advanced programms for editing video or sound or something like that)

You dont have to go into details here, simple answers will do   :Very Happy: 

Thnx  :Smile: 

oh, yeah, one more thing ...

If I do need graphic card, what do you think about this one AMD Radeon 7750 Powercolor 1GB/DDR3/HDMI/DVI/VGA/128bit/AX7750 1GBK3-H? Will that do the work with new Gnome/KDE?

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## eccerr0r

I have multiple machines with only onchip graphics.  I've found a lot of things it's well fast enough to do most tasks.   They even run games through Wine acceptably.  I don't watch HD movies so I can't vouch for the speed on that (though I do run MythTV watching 1080i streams downconverted 720p on an even older machine with onchip Intel Graphics and it runs fine too.)

I only run Gnome2 on my machines so I can't vouch for Gnome3, but had no performance issues with it.  Windows7 Aero seems to work fine on it too...

I'd be more concerned with what the most demanding app you want to run on the machine, would it be playing HD movies?  Flash (ugh...)?  These should be just fine I think.  It's basically games that push the graphics hard.

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## Und3i2c0v3i2

well yeah, I would like to watch HD movies, I want to be able to open any website (even those made in flash) and such things ... but nothing special 

thank you very much for your comment, you were very helpfull!

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## srs5694

I doubt if even HD video playback will cause problems for a modern computer with built-in graphics. I've got a ~4-year-old MythTV box with an Intel Celeron E3300 and Intel G45/G43 chipset, and it can handle 1080i playback fine, typically at about 120% CPU load. (This is a dual-core CPU, so 120% is really more like 60% on each core.) It is a bit flaky with 1080p Blu-ray playback, but I'm sure that a machine that's 4 years more recent would be able to handle that. If not, you can always add a separate video card later. In that case, I'd go nVidia rather than ATI, since nVidia's got better acceleration for video playback under Linux (or they did a while ago; it could be that's changed and I'm not aware of it).

I've got a Gigabyte board that I bought about a year ago that has their "Hybrid EFI," which is absolutely abysmal. It's basically an Award BIOS (which is OK) with a very buggy EFI implementation atop that. The specs for the board you're considering say that it's got an AMI EFI, though, so with any luck that will be better for you. I've got two systems with AMI EFIs, and they're both OK. This is important because the change from BIOS to EFI is proving to be very rough, thanks to numerous factors including buggy and limited EFI implementations. (Note that Gigabyte's claim that the board has an "AMI EFI BIOS" is an oxymoron; that's like saying a car is a "Ford tractor boat". People know the term "BIOS," though, so manufacturers are abusing it in the interests of familiarity.)

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## eccerr0r

The MythTV box of mine is a G965 based board with a Core2 Duo for reference.  Decoding the ATSC OTA HDTV streams (1080i -> 720p display) doesn't take much CPU.  What I've noticed that eats CPU?  The commercial flagging utility in mythtv...

There's really a problem with "EFI" - a lot of people don't understand what it is and the key words they hear that piques interest is "Supports larger than 2TB HDD".  So they look for it if they have a large hard drive.  However EFI has a different booting system, making it incompatible with MBR boot software.

Conflicting interests at best.

However Gigabyte apparently was tailoring their hardware to this kind of people who don't really care about EFI but have large disk support... so yes it makes sense why there's not a full EFI implementation on the board... it still works like BIOS.

(I have a Z68AP-D3 Gigabyte board that I use as a workstation, and it definitely does not look like EFI like my Itanium box.  However, my HP Envy4 should have EFI, this looks more like a real EFI but I'm not sure of all its details yet...)

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## srs5694

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> However Gigabyte apparently was tailoring their hardware to this kind of people who don't really care about EFI but have large disk support... so yes it makes sense why there's not a full EFI implementation on the board... it still works like BIOS.

 

The Gigabyte Hybrid EFI definitely is a full EFI implementation; it just sits atop a conventional BIOS to do the low-level hardware initialization, which is inefficient at best. It also happens to be a bug-laden EFI implementation with few user configuration options. The Hybrid EFI issues likely aren't relevant to the board the OP is planning on buying, though, since the specs say the EFI is from a different publisher (AMI vs. Award). I mentioned it specifically to point out that anything the OP might read elsewhere about Hybrid EFI likely is not relevant.

 *Quote:*   

> (I have a Z68AP-D3 Gigabyte board that I use as a workstation, and it definitely does not look like EFI like my Itanium box.  However, my HP Envy4 should have EFI, this looks more like a real EFI but I'm not sure of all its details yet...)

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "look like." EFI is not about the user interface, so when you go into the firmware setup utility, an EFI can have a user interface that's almost identical to that of a BIOS, something flashier, something simpler, or something that's just plain different. EFI is about how the computer gets booted and therefore what boot loaders you can run. Most EFI boards run most of the major Linux EFI boot loaders (the kernel's EFI stub loader, Fedora's patched GRUB Legacy, GRUB 2, ELILO, and one or two more obscure ones) and boot managers (both GRUBs, rEFIt, rEFInd, and gummiboot). A handful of EFI implementations have problems with one or another of these. For details on all of them, see my Web page on the subject.

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## eccerr0r

The problem is that I'm not sure the Gigabyte can actually run EFI applications.  I would like to see a way in BIOS setup to be able to start an EFI application but I do not see any options to do so.

However, both my Itanium and my Envy4 actually have EFI partitions and can execute EFI bytecode as far as I can tell (at least for the Envy4); though I don't know which binaries that I have are cross platform or not.  The firmware for both can fetch code from the EFI partition and run them without an OS.  The Envy4 is a weird beast as it also supports MBR boot, at least legacy GRUB will run directly on it - maybe a compatibility layer.

If there was a test EFI disk image somewhere that the Gigabyte board could boot and run bytecode, that would satisfy my curiosity.

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## srs5694

eccerr0r,

Try downloading the CD-R or USB flash drive image of rEFInd. This should be bootable on any x86 or x86-64 EFI-based system. ("Should," though, is a pretty risky word on EFI!) They also include an EFI shell application that you can launch and test the ability to launch EFI applications stored anywhere you like. Of course, rEFInd itself is an EFI application, too, so if rEFInd launches, you can be certain that the firmware is EFI. Oh, and there are both BIOS and EFI versions of GRUB, so the fact that a computer uses GRUB doesn't tell you much about its firmware type.

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