Gigabyte EP45-EXTREME

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by Rob Williams on October 20, 2008 in Motherboards

Intel’s P45 chipset proves to be one of the best mainstream offerings ever created, and Gigabyte put it to good use on their EP45-EXTREME. The board offers sweet cooling ability (which the help of a lot of copper), amazing overclocking potential (500MHz stable with a Quad!) and fantastic power efficiency – all at a good price.

Page 6 – System: HD Tune Pro, SiSoftware Sandra 2009

While application performance shouldn’t vary much between motherboards, one area where we can see greater differences is with synthetic benchmarks – at least with those that test both the storage and memory bandwidth/latency. Even still, if differences are seen, you are very unlikely to notice the difference in real-world usage, unless the performance hit is significant, which we’ve not found on any board we’ve tested in the past.

To test the storage I/O, we use a tool that we’ve been using for a number of years, HD Tune. The developer released a “Pro” version not long ago, so that’s what we are using for all of our storage-related benchmarking. The drive being tested is a secondary, installed into the first available Slave port, and is not the drive with the OS installed. To avoid potential latency, the drive is tested once Vista is idle for at least five minutes, and CPU usage remains stable at >1%.

Things weren’t shaping up too well for Gigabyte’s board at first, but this storage benchmark shows it’s no slouch in that area.

SiSoftware Sandra 2009

Yet another classic tool from our toolbox, SiSoftware’s Sandra is one of the ultimate benchmarking sidekicks around, allowing us to test almost every-single component in our PC, from CPU to GPU to memory to storage. In the case of our motherboard reviews, we stick with the memory bandwidth and latency tests, since its an area where some differences could very-well be seen.

As mentioned above, the results here don’t represent real-world performance, and if one motherboard sees the memory 4ns slower, the chances of you noticing the hit in real usage is highly unlikely, if not impossible. If any scenario would be effected, it would be processes that last the course of a few hours, not a few minutes.

It looked like the HD Tune test was going to turn things around, but Sandra shows that the EP45-EXTREME is a wee bit lacking on the overall memory bandwidth and latency side. Again, these differences are small, and it’s doubtful to affect real-world application, but it’s a difference nonetheless.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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