 |
| Our
Test System |
| Let's
Boogie! |
|
Intel
Pentium !!! 933EB (at 933MHz &
1015MHz), 128MB Mushkin
2-2-2 PC133 ram, nVidia GeForce 2 AGP, IBM
7200RPM 30GB UDMA/100 Hard Drive, Adaptec AHA-2940
SCSI controller, Plextor UltraPlex 40max,
WindowsME, DirectX 7.1 and Intel Chipset and ATA
Drivers
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| Over-clocking
with The GA-6OXM7E |
| It's
not in the BIOS?!? |
|
Now
for the bad news...or maybe it's good news, we'll
leave it up to you. Would be over-clockers
may be a bit disappointed with the GA-6OXM7E
because there are no over-clocking options
available in the system BIOS. All
over-clocking is done using Gigabyte's Easy Tune
III software.
We're
not going to go too in-depth with the Easy Tune
III software, Davo and I both covered it in our
previous reviews of the GA-7VX
and GA-7ZM
motherboards. The software is very
simple to use and adjusts FSBs in approximately
1mhz increments. (because of the frequency of the
PLL, it won't be exactly 1MHz increments, for
example, 100MHz FSB is actually 100.3Mhz
etc.) Not having the options in the BIOS may
not be a big deal to some but I found it a little
annoying. The Easy Tune III menu opens and
you must minimize it every time Windows loads...I
found this rather irritating.
Should you need to adjust the voltage of your CPU
when over-clocking, there is a jumper on the board
that increases it 10%.
 |
| Benchmarking
The GA-6OXM7E |
| Vroom.... |
|
We ran our usual
suite of benchmarks with the GA-6OXM7E.
First up is SiSofts Sandra. We ran these
tests at both the default clock speed with 133MHz
FSB and over-clocked using approximately 145MHz
FSB.
Let's see how our
CPU performed in this board...
SiSoft
Sandra
CPU
@
933Mhz
CPU @ 1015MHz
These
are some nice numbers. They are on par with
most other i815 boards in this
"class". Notice that at the
default 133MHz FSB the speed is reported at
939MHz.
Memory
@
933MHz
Memory @ 1015MHz
Memory
performance was very good in the GA-6OXM7E.
With a little maturation of both the i815 drivers
and the system BIOS we can expect these numbers to
improve. You all remember the VIA Apollo
133A right? :-) As time passed that chipset
virtually doubled it's memory performance.
Drives
@
933MHz
Drives @ 1015Mhz
The
performance doesn't really change when
over-clocked but who cares?!? That is an
excellent number for a single drive configuration.
We
also ran through a session of ZD Winbench to give
you an idea of real-world application
performance. This test was run at the
over-clocked speed of 1015MHz.
ZD
Winbench
Those
are some nice overall numbers. You won't be
disappointed in the performance of this
board. The system performed very well
throughout testing.
Just
for giggles, we also ran through some Quake 3
benchmarks using the on-board video common to most
i815 boards.
|
Quake
3 "Fastest" Setting |
| 640x480x16 |
45.9
FPS |
| 800x600x16 |
33.5
FPS |
| 1024x768x16 |
19.9
FPS |
As
you can see there is nothing to brag about.
Unless you'd be using this board strictly for
office type applications we strongly recommend
adding a more powerful video card.
The
Gigabyte GA-6OXM7E is a very nice all around
board. If it had over-clocking capabilities
via the system BIOS there really isn't much we
could hold against it. The GA-6OXM7E
performed very well and was rock-solid throughout
all of our testing. We found the Easy Tune
III software to be slightly annoying after
clicking the minimize button numerous times every
time Windows started but other than that we liked
this board very much. We give the Gigabyte
GA-6OXM7E a Hot Hardware meter rating of...
Get
in and talk it up in the Hot Hardware Conference
Room!
|
