|
The GA-8TX was a
breeze to set up. As we mentioned, the
motherboard will fit into any standard ATX case
without modification. So things were pretty
much plug and play.
 |
| Installation
and Setup |
| Simplicity |
|
Also
as we noted before, the board has a dip switch
bank for setting front side bus settings. We
set it to 100MHz., which is the standard for the
P4 which then is multiplied by 4 with the i850's
"Quad Pumped" clocking
architecture. So we were actually dialed
with a 400MHz. System Bus. We plugged in all
our connections, including the
ATX12V connector and we were ready to boot.
That's
when we noticed other "differences" with
the GA-8TX.
|
DMA
Collection Buffer
 |
RIMM
Voltage
 |
|
BIOS
Health Monitoring
 |
Integrated
Peripherals
 |
Alright
then, here are the notables. First, no FSB
Speed options are available in the GA-8TX
BIOS. Again, these are all controlled by dip
switches and you can select 100, 105, 110 and
133MHz. However, there are two setting in
this BIOS that we haven't seen yet in either the Asus
P4T or Intel
D850GB. First, "DMA Collection
Buffer" is an option available to enable or
disable. Since any amount of DMA Buffering
in memory is probably beneficial, we left it
enabled.
Also,
there is a "Over RIMM Voltage" setting
available in the BIOS. This may or may not
come in handy with respect to over-clocking the
memory bus. In addition, because this board
has no CPU Core Voltage Adjustments, the upside
for over-clocking with the GA-8TX may be minimal.
So, we
decided to crank the GA-8TX up as far above spec
as we could see how it handled things.
 |
| Overclocking
With The Gigabyte GA-8TX |
| A
little light in this department |
|
As you
can see in the above shot, we got the GA-8TX up to
a 110MHz. Front Side Bus with a System Bus of
440MHz. This was actually better than we
expected with a total of 150MHz. over the stock
speed of our test CPU. On the other hand,
this particular processor has hit 1735MHz. with
full stability on the Asus P4T.
Let's
move out to some benchmarks.
Sandra,
Winstone, Q3 and More |
