Gigabyte EP45-EXTREME

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Though it may be hard to believe, it's already been close to five months since Intel took the veil off their latest mainstream chipsets, G45 and P45. We've only taken a look at three of the new boards since then, but today marks the fourth. In our other reviews, we've been happy overall with the quality and performance exhibited, so we expect nothing less from the board we're taking a look at today, Gigabyte's EP45-EXTREME. What makes it so "EXTREME"? Well, not the price, for one thing. At ~$245 ($215 with MIR at one e-tailer), the board costs more than most mainstream offerings, but Gigabyte promises to make up for every extra dollar you spend. They do this by tauting extreme overclocking capabilities, including a lot of copper and a water-cooling block, a twelve-phase power solution and more. Compared to the $400 ASUS Rampage Extreme which we took a look at a few weeks ago, this board promises an awful lot, but for a far more reasonable sum. Coupled with the fact that the board utilizes DDR2, your entire new rig becomes less expensive when compared to ASUS' "Extreme" (which requires the more expensive DDR3). Closer Look. Like many other enthusiast P45 motherboards, Gigabyte has gone beyond what Intel states as being the maximum rated spec for both the memory and FSB, with a rating for DDR2-1200 and FSB rating for 1600MHz. Aside from that, P45 brought PCI-Express 2.0 to the mainstream market and also utilizes 8x PCI-E lanes if you choose to run Crossfire. Overall, it's proven to be a great chipset for the money. As you can see below, the EP45-EXTREME lives up to Gigabyte's habit of creating the most colorful boards on the market. Some of us don't like this, while others love it. I'm somewhere in the middle. It's good to have eye-candy, but I'm partial to a dark-colored board. Give me a pure black board and I'd be one happy tech-geek. The bottom-right corner is where most of the good stuff can be found, with a total of six S-ATA ports, including two vertically-mounted ones), a BIOS status LED, power button and the collection of ATX chassis connectors. Moving on over, we can find three PCI-E slots for your GPUs (tri-Crossfire could be used, though with degraded performance compared to an X48), three legacy PCI slots and also a single PCI-E 1x at the very top. The bottom of the board features both a 4-pin and 3-pin fan connector, the former which is seen in the below photo. As mentioned earlier, Gigabyte opted for DDR2 support on this board, obviously to save their customers money, and I can't disagree with the choice. A fan connector is conveniently placed to the side of the DIMM slots - perfect for that RAM fan. Gigabyte has been doing a great job modeling their chipset heatsinks, both for performance and aesthetics, and this one is no exception. If the likes of Gigabyte and ASUS keep things up, it might be a good time to invest in copper. You can see the twelve-phase power solution surrounding the CPU socket, as well as the BIOS battery hidden underneath the heatpipes in the top center of the photo. Although Gigabyte wasn't the first company to include a water-blocked Northbridge, it is appreciated. Even if you don't have the intention of using a water-cooling system on your rig, the heatsink is designed to effectively dissipate heat either way. The back I/O section is far from barren, with a total of eight USB ports, two LAN, 7.1 audio and S/PDIF connections, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports in addition to a Clear CMOS button... just in case things happen to go awry during overclocking. If you want proof that Gigabyte loves their copper, look no further than the photograph below. This massive add-in "card" is designed to plug into the board, above the PCI-E 1x slot, and intertwine into the Northbridge section, ultimately making the entire passive cooling rig as one. Is it necessary? No. Is it gaudy? Oh yeah. That's a matter of opinion of course, and it's difficult to complain about an add-in like this in an already well-priced board. Finally, included in the accessories you'll find all the necessary HDD/ODD cables, along with an add-in card that adds some e-SATA functionality to the board, and another for Firewire. Also included is the manual and driver DVD, along with a few stickers and the back I/O panel. Overall, this is a great-looking motherboard and packs a lot of functionality. The add-in copper heatsink seems a little unneeded, but there's little denying it should keep the Northbridge cooler than other solutions. It's just too bad that it takes up so much room. Layout-wise, the board also delivers. The most inconvenient thing I found was the location of the 8-pin motherboard connector, but given that most people will only plug this in once or twice, it isn't that bad. If I had second complaint, I would have loved to have seen two more S-ATA ports vertically-mounted. It's not that important, but it definitely looks better when all installed. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Checking Out the BIOS] I'll admit that I'm not the biggest fan of the BIOS' used on Gigabyte's boards, but this one wasn't too bad to work with. I do feel it was a little bit clunkier than it needed to be - something I really don't think about when using a BIOS from ASUS. I'd love to see Gigabyte further improve their BIOS' in the future, both for ease-of-use and slow page refreshing. That complaint aside, the board offers a slew of tweaking options that will make the enthusiast happier than a peach... if a peach could somehow be happy. The simplest options to stick to include the clock ratio, host frequency, memory multiplier and then select voltages. These options are scattered all over, so you'll have to scroll up and down constantly. The voltage selection here is top-notch... better than any other motherboard I've ever seen. In some ways it's a little overkill, but if you have the skills needed to properly handle all these, then you'll feel right at home. I personally stuck with the CPU, MCH and DRAM primary voltages, which served me well in our overclocking tests, as we'll tackle later. I'll let the rest of the images speak for themselves, since there's nothing truly new here. As I hoped, the EP45-EXTREME's BIOS certainly delivered. Though it's a little clunky, it offers an intense amount of tweaking-ability, and that's sure to be appreciated by any overclocker. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. If there is a bit of information that we've omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums. Test System. The table below lists our machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all testing, with the exception of the motherboard. Each board used for the sake of comparison is also listed here, along with the BIOS version used. In addition, each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, you will be led to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 - Quad-Core, 3.2GHz, 1.30v Motherboards ASUS P5E3 Premium - X48-based, 0505 BIOS (06/11/08) ASUS P5Q Deluxe - P45-based, 0204 BIOS (08/28/08) ASUS Rampage Extreme - X48-based, 0501 BIOS (08/28/08) Gigabyte EP45-EXTREME - P45-based, F8 BIOS (09/30/08) Memory DDR3: Corsair XMS3 DHX 2x2GB - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-15-1T, 1.91v DDR2: Corsair Dominator 2x2GB - DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15-2T, 2.10v Graphics Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB (Catalyst 8.9) Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 x 2 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with Diskeeper 2008 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. Windows Vista Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) and screen saver are disabled. Windows Defender, Firewall, Security Center, Search, Sidebar and Updates are disabled. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Application Benchmarks. When benchmarking a graphics card or processor, performance is expected to scale in a certain manner, but that's not the case with motherboards. Since motherboards tend to only be as fast as the hardware installed on them, we don't run an exhaustive collection of benchmarks for the sake of avoiding redundancy. For the most part, one motherboard with an equal chipset to another should offer close to equal performance. Our primary goal with motherboard-related benchmarking is to see if one motherboard is lacking in a certain area when compared to the rest. These discrepancies, if they exist, are usually caused by lackluster components on the board itself, which is why higher-end motherboards tend to see slightly better results than the more budget-oriented offerings. To properly test the performance of a...

Gigabyte EP45-EXTREME

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Rob Williams