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Layout

The board is colored in Gigabyte's traditional blue color. And it seems that the color is the only likeness to GA-8SRX. The differences start from the size: the board is very small (200mm x 293mm, 7.8'' x 11.4''). As the result, it is easy to install the board. For more convenience, Gigabyte engineers rounded board's corners and they pay special attention to this improvement.

It is pleasant to note that power supply connector is located near the edge under DIMM slots. But auxiliary 4-pin connector is near processor socket, almost in the center of the board. It is so important but it is not convenient anyway.

Processor socket is turned to 90 degrees. There is nothing more to tell about it, however such orientation prevents the motherboard from bending when a box cooler is installed.

In a review of GA-8SRX board I used to note that the north bridge of SiS645 chipset warms only slightly (even at high FSB clocks) and passive cooling is enough for its normal operation. Our board is based on Intel 845E chipset, which was warming notably more. Well, let's see how it will affect stability and overclocking results.

Nothing obstructs to install extra cooling. SYS_FAN cooler connector can be used for this. By the way, there are two connectors. Another one is designed for CPU cooler. Actually, PCB design provides 3 connectors: one more fan can be plugged to PWR_FAN connector (near DIMM slots) but unfortunately it is not soldered.
There are 3 DIMM slots, up to 2Gbytes of RAM can be installed (chipset limitation). Both PC1600 and PC2100 memory can be used. There is no memory power LED indicator; it's an obvious disadvantage.

There is a connector of 3'' FDD nearby.

Unfortunately computer industry can't invent a worthy and inexpensive alternative to disk drive. This constrains users to bind themselves with 1.4Mb disks and forces assemblers to deal with lots of cables.
Because of a small size of the motherboard, Gigabyte engineers had to move IDE connectors to the very corner of the board, to USB connectors.

Such layout of connectors will make it impossible to install full-size cards into PCI5 slot (and possibly into PCI4).
We'll also note that PCB design does not cover RAID controller installation. For those users who need a system with RAID array, Gigabyte offers an expanded variation of GA-8IEXP with a controller from Promise. There are also GA-8IGX on Intel 845G chipset and GA-8IHXP on Intel 850E chipsets. The latter one is equipped with ICH4 that is a certain divergence from Intel specifications,Now let's talk about expansion possibilities. There are 5 PCI slots, one AGP slot and no AMR/CNR slots installed on the board.

AGP slot has a video card latch, which is specific for Gigabyte. Besides, we should note that installed videocard blocks latches of DIMM slots. This concerns even reasonably short videocards.

Now we are going to discuss the most interesting point. Let's take a look at ICH4 south bridge.

Big size of this chip captures the attention. And this is not a surprise because ICH4 has onboard USB2.0 support. As the result, Gigabyte GA-8IE supports 6 USB2.0 ports (two of them are installed on the back panel and the other ones can be added with extra brackets). I remind that the package contains only one extra bracket.

Let's remember that till recent times it was necessary to install additional chips to provide USB 2.0 interface (NEC D720100AGM chip on Microstar K7T266 Pro2-RU or rather popular VIA VT6202 on Gigabyte GA-7VRX).

There is a BIOS chip in the area of USB connectors (they are colored in yellow). Search of a second chip was not successful. Unlike most of Gigabyte boards, 8IE does not support DUALBios technology. This technology makes it safe to upgrade BIOS from Windows. For quite safe BIOS upgrade, one should either use DOS flash program or Q-Flash utility. Q-Flash is a built-in utility which allows BIOS upgrade before any operating system starts. To do this it's enough to insert a floppy disk with a new BIOS version and to press F8.

Now let's talk about onboard sound. It is based on the new Realtek ALC650 six-channel audio codec (until recent times ALC201 chip was the most popular solution). Actually, Gigabyte was famous for its tradition to make onboard sound on Creative CT5880 chip, which in addition to four-channel output support was using little processor resources. In our case we can't treat new chip as a fully hardware sound, a part of processor time will be allocated for sound processing. The new codec is fully compliant with AC'97 v2.2 standard and supports DVD (6 channels, digital input/output S/PDIF). By the way, S/PDIF output is located near PCI5 slot. S/PDIF input is provided by PCB standard but not installed on our board. Audio connectors (CD-in, S/PDIF) are located near the board's back panel and it is rather convenient to connect cables to them.

A place for RTL8100 network controller is reserved near sound codec chip and ITE8702F-A I/O subsystem chip is installed. Actually this chip supports system monitoring functions, however it seems like its possibilities are not used fully. There is no information about processor temperature, fan speeds and current voltages in BIOS. It can be said that system monitoring virtually absent in the board. There is only one BIOS point: case security control. Probably, these are the drawbacks of quite raw BIOS version and future upgrades will change this situation.

The back panel looks standard.

There are very few jumpers on the board: BIOS setup clear CLR_CMOS, two-pin security sensor.
Board's BIOS is based on Award BIOS v.6.00PG, but the set of its options shocks with its poorness. Memory subsystem performance is defined by the only parameter ("Top Performance"), which has only two values: "Enable" and "Disable". The difference of performances, measured before and after modification of this parameter, does not exceed measurement error. Memory management capabilities are also minimize: we can set memory clock to either 200MHz or 266MHz and that's all. Also, I haven't found an AGP Aperture Size setting, which radically influence graphic subsystem performance. Most probably, the board has a raw BIOS version.

• Page1 - Chipset. Specifications.
• Page2 - Layout.
• Page3 - Performance and Conclusions.