John Gillooly spans two generations of memory technology.
One of the most fundamental joys of buying a product for upgrading is exploring the extra bells and whistles that are in the box, a joy that Gigabyte has taken to extreme levels with the GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard. Inside the ludicrously sized box is nearly every accessory you will need, making this one of the most complete mobos we have ever seen in the Atomic labs.
Our PCI Express (PCI-E) testing this month has meant we've played with a lot of boards based on Intel's Express chipsets, but the GA-8GPNXP Duo stood out from the pack, not only due to its features but it's also the only board so far to enter the Atomic labs with support for either two sticks of DDR2 533 RAM or up to four sticks of DDR400.
But dual memory is not the only defining feature of this board. It marks the debut of a new dual power system board from Gigabyte, which now uses a small heatpipe cooler to keep it cool and quiet. This add-in board also has a row of LEDs that show how much power drain is occurring.
Besides these features, there is also dual Gigabit Ethernet, three x1 PCI-E and one x16 PCI-E slots. It also has two channels of parallel ATA RAID longside the one parallel and four SATA ports incorporated within the ICH6 southbridge. It ships with a PCIbased 802.11b/g wireless card; but this does not use the new wireless Access Point hardware that Intel has built into the ICH6- RW version of its southbridge. We tested the GA-8GPNXP Duo with both Corsair DDR2 533 and DDR400, using a Gigabyte GeForce PCX 5750 graphics card. Our testing for this month's Head 2 Head showed that there was no measurable difference between the performance of the i925X, i915P and i915G chipsets, so instead we have focused upon the performance difference between DDR400 and DDR2 533 on this board. From looking at the graphs you can clearly see that there is no noticeable performance gap between the two memory technologies in either the gaming focused Aquamark 3 or the memory bandwidth sensitive SPECViewperf.
The complete lack of performance difference is great for those looking to upgrade, especially if you already have a DDR-based system. At the moment, DDR2 is a costly option and your money would be better spent on a PCI-E graphics card, as there is no AGP support whatsoever in the new chipsets (any boards that have AGP slots will be running them at reduced speed and hence low performance via the PCI bus).
While there is no tangible performance boost to be gained over the previous generation i865 chipset, those looking at upgrading to a Pentium 4 system are advised to look forward and go with one of these Express chipsets. Our testing has told us that the best option in terms of price/performance is the i915P, and it is the combination of this and an astonishing range of features that makes the Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo the standout i915P board in the initial batch of products. There are so many bells and whistles on this board that we are still discovering new things everyday. Good work Gigabyte.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012