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Overclocking and Stability

There were no any failures on nominal frequency. But all attempts of overclocking were not successful. Pentium4 1.6A couldn't work reliably even at 133MHz. Surely this processor is not very fortunate, but on previously reviewed boards it used to work at 140MHz. And 133MHz is a duty frequency of i845E chipset. We can't again claim instability because this is not a duty frequency for my processor (at which stability is not guaranteed). Besides that, there is a certain probability that I've got an unlucky sample of the motherboard.

Possibly, a slight raise of Vcore voltage could fix the problem but the board does not allow changing this setting. The possibility to increase voltages on other components of the board does not present too. That is why I conclude that the board is not appropriate for overclocking.

Performance

The following equipment was used to test the system:
· Intel Pentium 4 processor, 1.6GHz (Northwood);
· Video card: InnoVision Tornado GeForce MX440 on NVidia Geforce4 chip, 64Mb, NVidia Detonator v28.35;
· Sound card: Creative Live 5.1;
· HDD: IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb;
· 256Mb of PC2100 DDR SDRAM (Samsung);
· Case: Inwin506 with PowerMan 250W power supply;
· Operating system: Windows 2000 English.

In the beginning let's look at the results of working applications.

Now let's take a look at synthetic tests, which show theoretical performance.

Now let's see what game test will show us.

Conclusion

The board seems to be a raw product and the most limited among all Gigabyte's boards on i845E chipset. But why does it have so high price ($120) for which I have performance of Gigabyte GA-8SRX on SiS645 ($80). BIOS with very poor options and slim manual does not improve my impression.

Summary

P.S. In the nearest future we'll have an opportunity to look at Gigabyte GA-8IEXP, which is based on the same i845E chipset but has a bigger set of possibilities. These are RAID controller, IEEE 1394, Dual BIOS, Network, expanded overclocking capabilities. Besides that it would be interesting to see board's BIOS, overclocking results and surely user manual.

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

This product was purchased in retail sail. That is why this review is maximally objective. Besides, I am absolutely independent on anyone in making my conclusions.