Gigabyte GA-7VM400MF and GA-8IPE1000 Pro2

This is a VIA KM400 chipset based motherboard for Athlon XP processor. The board has a 333MHz FSB and supports up to 2 GB of DDR333 SDRAM. It has onboard graphics with 32 MB shared memory, AGP 8X slot, three PCI slots, four USB ports, three FireWire ports, six channel sound and LAN.

We tested the motherboard with an Athlon XP 3000+, 512 MB RAM and a 7200 rpm HDD. The tests were done with both onboard graphics and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 AGP Graphics card with 128MB video RAM.

The board performed very well in productivity and content creation benchmarks. The scores in Business Winstone (BW) and Content Creation (CCW) were below only the Asus A7N8X Deluxe (Athlon based) motherboard with external graphics card. with the onboard graphics also the scores were good. However, the result of graphics and gaming performance was not on the top spot for both external graphics and onboard graphics. But for moderate gaming it can be considered decent.
However, the best thing about the board is that it is pocket friendly. 

The GA-81PE1000 Pro2 motherboard is based on the Intel 865PE chipset for the P4 processor. The board supports 800 MHz FSB and dual channel DDR400 SDRAM up to a maximum of 4 GB. Other specifications are AGP 8X slot, five PCI slots, eight USB ports, three firewire ports, two SATA connectors, six channel sound and gigabit LAN.

This board is the younger cousin of the Gigabyte GA-8PENXP board reviewed in October 2003 (page 108), which was also based on the same chipset but had many more features than this board. Looking at the performance of this board, the Business Winstone and Content Creation scores were one of the best among the P4 processor boards, but were lower than the Athlon-based boards. In graphics and gaming benchmarks also, the results were mixed. It gave excellent Quake III scores, but 3D Mark Scores were lower than the other two P4 based boards. But here, it was clearly above the Athlon in both the graphic tests.

Overall, price and performance of this board is comparable with other boards in this segment. So you can opt for any board out of these, based on availability and support provided.

Anoop Mangla