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Features and Setup |
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Granite Bay
with all the creature comforts |
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The rest
of the layout of the P4G8X is excellent.
Specifically, the location of the DDR DIMM sockets
relative to the AGP slot, gives the socket clips
enough room to extend outward for easy DIMM removal
without disturbing your AGP card. This has been
an area of some frustration with other boards for us
as of recent. Once again however, this board
does NOT suffer from this affliction.
CLICK
ANY IMAGE FOR FULL VIEW
One thing
we would have liked to have seen would be a parallel
RAID solution here as well as the SATA connections.
Sadly however, even the Promise SATA RAID controllers
out on the market only support one channel of EIDE
with SATA RAID only. Regardless, the PC market
is definitely marching toward full adoption of the
SATA interface, so it is understandable why chip level
solutions lean heavily towards it as well.
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Asus P4G8X BIOS |
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What MSI
should have done with the GNB MAX |
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Now this is where the
Asus P4G8X steps out in a feature competition versus
the
MSI GNB Max. The P4G8X BIOS is everything
the MSI board should and could be, with future
revisions. There are a wealth of FSB, Voltage,
AGP and Memory Timings in this BIOS and it is ripe for
overclocking, as we will show you in the pages to
follow.
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR
FULL VIEW
The only
complaint we have here is that the P4G8X BIOS revision
we've tested, doesn't support memory timing
multiplication or divisors. That is to say the
the memory bus speed is locked at the FSB speed and
then distributed through a standard Differential DDR
clock driver, without the ability to goose it up or
down in ratios etc. This may or may not be a
limitation of the Granite Bay chipset itself but we
are looking into it with various contacts and will
report our findings.
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Test System Setup |
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Intel Power
System |
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TEST BOARDS:
ASUS P4G8X (E7205 - Granite Bay)
MSI GNB Max_FISR (E7205 - Granite Bay)
Asus P4PE (i845E)
Intel DM850EMVR (i850E)
COMMON
HARDWARE:
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz
CPU (533MHz FSB)
512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR DRAM
512MB Samsung PC1066 RDRAM
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
On-board AC'97 audio
IBM ATA100 7200rpm 30GB Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
Intel Chipset Drivers v 4.10.1012
Intel Application
Accelerator v2.2.2
ATi Catalyst Drivers
v2.4
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