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Breaking convention,
the two RAID IDE ports were neon green,
and the nearby USB 2.0 headers were
yellow. The PCI and CNR slots looked
normal, but the AGP slot was a bright
purple, with a unique kind of retention
system. Instead of a locking
mechanism using a clip, there is a sliding
bar that worked like a charm, locking the
AGP card firmly into the slot. The
three DIMM slots were colored in a light
blue, and the two standard ATA ports were
also colored, the primary IDE channel in
red and the secondary channel in white.
In fact, in a great move towards making
setting up a system even easier, the front
panel header was also color coded.
This made it much easier to determine
which pins the cables were to be connected
to.
As with the
Abit BE7, on board audio is supplied by a
Realtek ALC650 CODEC chip, offering 6
channel audio with S/PDIF output options.
Included in the box was a bracket with
the additional jacks needed to hook up the
extra speakers. To make another
comparison, the RAID functions are
provided by the same Promise 20276 RAID
controller that we found on the MSI board,
which supports up to four ATA100/133
drives in RAID 0/1/0+1 configurations.
Combined with the standard ATA100 IDE
ports, the board can support up to eight
separate drives. LAN duties are
handled by an Intel Pro 100 VE
controller supporting 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
connections.
The I/O connections
consisted of two PS/2 ports for the mouse
and keyboard, two USB 2.0 ports and a
LAN jack, two serial and one parallel
ports, a game port and three audio connections.
Behind these connectors was the power array, with
the 12V ATX power connection nestled in
with the capacitors and MOSFETs.
This placement was not preferred as it
meant running the cable from the power
supply unit directly over the top of the
CPU and heatsink. The other
20-pin ATX connection was in a much better
position, up in the corner by the floppy
connector, away from the other
components. Again, the position of
capacitors, and in this case, the heatsink
on the Northbridge prevented us from
installing larger heatsinks. The
cooler on the Northbridge was a
custom model made for Gigabyte that we
feel and added to the
overall look of the board.
One other note
of interest was the inclusion of a
separate NEC USB 2.0 chip. The
i845PE chipset already supports up to 6
USB 2.0 ports, utilizing the two ports on
the board, and the four found on the extra
bracket. The NEC chip added an
additional four ports bringing the total
to 10 ports, enough for connecting to a
whole slew of devices. This would,
of course, require the purchase of an
additional bracket. We would have
preferred to see FireWire connections,
however, instead of the extra USB ports.
THE BUNDLE:
The bundle
was very complete, with all sorts
of manuals and brackets. There was a
standard user's manual as well as a manual
devoted to the RAID setup. A large,
full
color map made identifying components a
snap. We also found a cool decal
which can be attached to the inside of the
case for easy reference. This means
no fumbling around for the manual months
later when upgrading. This is something we
really would like to see included in the future
by other manufacturers. Mentioned
earlier, there were two brackets.
One supplied four extra USB 2.0 ports
while the other was used for extra speaker
connections, as well as digital output.
Rounding out the bundle were IDE and
floppy cables, with the 80-pin IDE cable
colored yellow (I would have said to match
the yellow RAID ports, but they were green
on this board), a drivers CD, and a case
badge were also included..
THE BIOS AND OVERCLOCKING:
The BIOS came
from AWARD, and at first it seemed that
we were missing any kind of AGP or RAM
settings that would be used to improve
performance. Noticeably absent from
the Main menu was the Advanced Features
section. We went into the Advanced
BIOS and Integrated Peripherals sections
of the BIOS and found a slew of
options for enabling or disabling
practically every I/O device on the board.
Going down the list, we finally reached an
item simply titled, "Top Performance".
The manual's explanation for this entry
was, "if you wish to maximize the
performance of your system, set this to
Enabled." Well, we of course set
this to Enabled since we wouldn't want
anything but top performance, right?
We ran our benchmarks with this kind of
setup, believing that these were all of
the tweaks we could use. Truth was,
the original set of scores fell short of
our expectations.
In the
course of writing up this review, however,
we found something a little strange.
Almost hidden in the manual, and not
mentioned anywhere else that we could
find, was a command to enable the Advanced
Features in the BIOS. After getting
into the BIOS, the user must then hit
CTRL-F1 to allow the modification of the
DRAM timings and AGP settings. It
was unclear to us why these options would
need to be hidden from the user, or not
have this command listed on the main menu
itself. Needless to say, it was back
to the testing grounds with the "improved"
system. All of the scores in the
following tests are shown with this new
setup. Overclocking with the 8PE667
went very well. This board, like the
others offers the ability to lock the
AGP/PCI speed. It also gives users
the ability to alter the VCore, AGP and
DDR voltages. When all was said and
done, we were able to hit a stable top FSB
speed of 168MHz, which equates to 2856MHz.
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Benchmarking the systems
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