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Follow UsDesktop motherboards seem to have come of age and have started incorporating features that were found only in workstations or servers until now. This new Gigabyte board has many such features.
To begin with, it has two BIOS chips onboard, and one of them acts as a hot spare for the main BIOS. If one fails due to any reason, the second one takes over the system after a system reboot. Second, it has dual power system for the CPU, which provides 6-phase power circuit, and if one power system fails, the second will continue supplying power to the CPU.
The board also has four Serial ATA connectors with two supporting RAID 0, 1 and hot swap function to add and remove drives while the system is running. Apart from the normal IDE connectors, it has two more IDE connectors, which support RAID 0, 1, 0+1. All these functions are required on servers and workstations for reliability and performance.
Other specifications include an Intel 865PE chipset, 800 MHz FSB, 4 GB dual channel DDR 400 SDRAM support, AGP 8X Pro slot, 5 PCI slots, 8 USB ports, FireWire ports, On-board Gigabit LAN, On-board RealTek sound codec with 6 channel sound and SP-DIF digital, optical output. It also comes with connectors for surround and SP-DIF sound, USB, FireWire, and connectors for hooking up
SerialATA drives externally.
| Content Creation Winstone Winstone Units |
Quake III Arena 640*480*16 fps |
3D Mark 2001SE 640*480*16 3D Marks |
|
| ASUS P4P800-VM |
101 | 384.6 | 17860 |
| ASUS P4P800-VM ** |
99.9 | 138.7 | 4492 |
| Gigabyte GA-8PENXP |
102.4 | 405.4 | 18,637 |
| Intel 865GBF |
102.4 | 398.3 | 18,321 |
| Intel 865GBF ** |
101.3 | 140.9 | 4,350 |
| Intel 875 PBZ |
102.8 | 413 | 18,832 |
| ** Tested with on-board graphics |
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To test its performance, we used a P4 3.0 GHz with 800 MHz FSB and hyperthreading, 512 MB DDR-400 SDRAM in dual channel configuration, GeForce 4 Ti graphics card with 128 MB video RAM and 7200 RPM
HDD.
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The board performed extremely well with scores marginally higher than the Intel 865GBF motherboard. In addition, it performed only slightly below Intel’s 875PBZ board, which is based on Intel’s best chipset till date, the 875P.
Overall, the board boasts of a whole lot of features and also performs equally. All of this of course comes at a hefty price tag of Rs 14,500, which is fine if you plan to use all the features. Otherwise, you may want to look for cheaper alternatives like the 865GBF from Intel, which was priced at Rs 7,500 when we reviewed it in July, and the 875PBZ was priced at
Rs.11,500.
Anoop Mangla