GA-8INXP FINALLY came! Now need everything else..

[Rahl03]

Well it finally got here, since I work for a distributor, I managed to get 2 pieces from gigabyte at cost. It's rediculous what some people are charging for this board, knowing what I paid for it. Either way, supply and demand, you know. Even so, I never felt like I got more for my money. This board is seriously packed to the brim with features. Just opening up the box was like unwrapping a bag full of christmas presents. So many accessories! It even has a connector on the board for a digital smart card reader.

Lacking parts and patience, I immediately grabbed whatever was lying around the office and gave it a spin! Stuck a 1.5ghz williamette in there and 1 256mb DDR333 dimm (no dual channel for me yet =P ). The board defaults at 133mhz fsb and to my surprise when I enabled user defined clock speed and rebooted, it showed 1.98ghz without a hitch. Installed WinXP and ran the Sandra burn in 10 times... ROCK SOLID! Wow, either this is an exceptional board for overclocking or I got lucky with a good williamette CPU. 25% overclock at default voltage, not bad.

Unfortunately, the system is hobbled by the 256k L2 cache on the p4 1.5, single channel config, and a slow ass ancient maxtor drive. But so far, I am very impressed.

I have 2 sticks of samsung pc2700 otw and a p4 2.4ghz northwood. I think I'll just run a moderate overclock to 2.66 or 2.8

Overall, very happy!

 

[poMONKey]

all we wanna see is the marks man... just the marks ( or probs )

 

[Rahl03]

How ironic, as I was typing out the header to that message, the ti4200 8x I have in it locked up according to winxp. Looks like there may be AGP 8x issues or something. I disabled EZtune because I plain don't trust it. When I opened it up it wanted to run my agp/pci at 88/44!!! eek. Rebooted after I nuked EZtune, and reverified the pci/agp lock and it seems to be fine. My board shipped with the F3 bios, which seems to be a lot more fully featured than the F2 bios. FSB adjustments go up to 355 now, and memory latency settings are no longer "hidden".

I promise benchies when my real CPU/HD/RAM get here hehe

 

[IBuyUFO]

How much did you get it for and can I get one from you? I'll pay a little extra

 

[Rahl03]

I'm not out to make extra money on anyone, I was in the same situation as you. Unfortunately all the pieces we got were already earmarked for ppl very early on. If you want, search pricewatch for amastore.com and place a pre-order with us, mention that you're from anandtech, and I'll personally make sure that you get a board when our next batch comes in. I gotta tell ya though, gigabyte is being very unclear about giving any sort of definite ETA, so by the time they get here, the sis 655 boards may already be on the market.
Good luck whatever you decide, I probably would have waited for the sis 655 or a canterwood, but I've already been waiting 3 months to build this system and if i kept waiting for the next best thing I'd never have a proper computer!