Gigabyte® GA-8I945P Dual Graphic-R Review-World's First SLI on i945 Chipset?

FanBoy TechWeb

Warning!!! A FanBoy's Technical (and non Technical) WebSite. Geared for enthusiasts and noobies, experts excluded but can be included too!

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Article: Gigabyte® GA-8I945P Dual Graphic-R Review (World's First SLI on i945 Chipset?)

Target Audience: E/O (N=Newbie, E=Hardware Enthusiast, O=Overclocker, B=Budget
Many thanks to AsiantTech, and TipidPC for providing the motherboard and videocards, Intel® for providing the processor.

V. Performance Testing

It's time to put the motherboard to the test*. Since it's targetted at a broad range of users, I decided to focus on making it at as capable gaming rig with lots of storage options to boot. I will try to put mainstream parts to the system. I used One Gigabyte of RAM to simulate a typical gaming sytstem but I also decided to use a SATA RAID-0 set-up to simulate fast disk access subsystem, and also tried out how IDE RAID works. I will test it under a Dual Core system.

  • Intel® Pentium® D 950 (3.4GHz)

Intel® Pentium® D 950 (3.4GHz/2x2MB/800MHz)

  • Processor: Intel® Pentium® D 3.4GHz
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte® 8I945P Dual Graphic-R
  • Memory: 1024MB Nanya DDR2-533 (2x512MB CL4-4-4-12)
  • Hard Disk: 2x Seagate 120GB 7200rpm SATA RAID 0
  • Hard Disk: 2x Seagate 80GB 7200rpm IDE RAID 0
  • Video Card: 2x Gigabyte 6600GT
  • Optical Drive: LG DVD Drive
  • Floppy Drive: Generic
  • Chassis: None
  • Power Supply: Enermax EG465P 20pin ATX v1.3
  • Operating System: Windows XP SP2

::Gaming::

Doom3

::Subsystem Test::

PCMark02

PCMark04

PCMark05

Sandra-CPU

Sandra-Multimedia

Sandra-RAM Bandwidth

Sandra-File Access (SATA RAID)

Sandra-File Access (IDE RAID)

::3D Test::

3DMark01SE

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

The system performs above my expectations. The 3DMark01SE results is above average, competitive with other boards performance using similar discrete video cards. PCMark results shows what is to be expected from the system, and has been consistent with what I've seen with similar specifications. Sandra-RAM bandwidth shows decent results, while hard Disk bandwidth is also not a slouch! It is also noticeable that IDE RAID0 may not give any performance benefit versus SATA RAID, but it is there if you need it, and there will be some boost if and when needed.

*: In the tests, I am not be able to provide links to submissions due to the fact that I only use the shareware version. For example, Futuremark's PCMark04 only allows one active publication of score, though users can have as much as five(5) entries, but only one can be made public. And in the future reviews and article, providing a link will make older link obsolete. To circumvent this, I will just use screenshots of the results

<< Prev Next >>