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GA-8IRX and P4 northwood 1.6A

B

benjamat

Senior member
like some others purchased this mobo on the strength of Anands glowing recommendation of the Ga-8IRXP thinking that i would have a board that suited me as I had no need of raid or USB2

Like others I was extremely dissapointed when I got the board and discovered that even though it had voltage settings for dimm and Agp as well as ratio adjusters for fsb overclock it had no CPU core voltage overclock.

Now let me say right away that this board clocked to 138mhz and therefore 2.2 ghz with a Northwood 1.6A processor so it isnt all bad but as the temp was only 35c at this rating I had high hopes for more. Rock stable with intel cooling and no voltage adjustments, ratio set to 2 to bring AGP back to 68.

With no discoverable fixes i took a gamble with flashing the bios with the GA8Ixrp version thinking that with the gigabyte dual bios backup i might get away with it and I did, disabling raid and usb2 in the bios and hurray I now had CPU core voltage in the bios or so it seemed.

While I am of course happy with a 600mhz overclock I find I cannot get to the 2.4ghz I was hoping for and indeed it seems that my overclocking is identical to the overclocking capabilities without the cpu core voltage adjustments although i did get further than before before windows failed to start.

I wonder is this because it is all my cpu will do irrespective of the voltage, seems unlikely or is the voltage adjustment just a non functional gimmick as SiSoft Sandra does not show the voltage as changed from the recorded 1.49.

Some wisdom would be interesting.
 
brave move!

just do the wire mod for more voltage.

ps. other than the lack of vcore adjust, how is the board stability-wise, etc.?
 
Well at first everything seemed okay with the system just as stable as before however tonight after I had re-installed XP on my second machine (P3700 @ 904) and tried to connect the Lan I spent hours failing to get the link to work and eventually discovered the Nic not in my devices list.
Bad card I thought so to check swopped with the second machine (same cards) and it was recognised happily in the second machine while the one from that machine was not recognised in the P4 machine, - what to do - well flash back the latest 8iRx bios and lo and behold the nic was recognised.
In addition I believe now that even though the XRP bios showed the voltage adjustment that it did nothing and is probably not supported on the mobo.

Hope this is usefull.
 


<< like some others purchased this mobo on the strength of Anands glowing recommendation of the Ga-8IRXP thinking that i would have a board that suited me as I had no need of raid or USB2 >>



A quick visit to Gigabytes page would have shown that these are two completely different models, geared at two different crowds.

Did Anand mention the 8IRX in his article?

Anyway.. your've now got two options.. return the board for 8irxp or do the voltage mod. Personally, if your happy with the board, I'd just do the voltage mod. Here is a good article on the v-mod trick.

CH2
 
Firstly I state clearly in the post title that I am talking about the RX not the RXP so codehack2 I see no reason for you to post snide replies. No where do I criticise anand.

Further to my experiences I have tried the wire trick with the 8IRX and bearing in mind that the bios for this has no core adjustment the new value shown was 1.62 volts instead of 1.5 which was born out by other tests. With this in place I upped the stakes and achieved in excess of 2400 which was impressive indeed considering the standard intel heatsink etc. I dont think installing the 8IRXP bios as I have done previously would make any difference as I do not think the board itself is set up for core value adjustment.

So, do not buy the 8IRX as I did thinking I would get all the benefits of the 8IRXP except for raid and usb2 because you will also lose the ability to adjust Vcore. having said this my 8IRX with P4 1.6A Northwood goes straight to 2.200 with standard voltage and cooling and is rock solid. Also if you think you will pay the extra for the 8IRXP be aware that anything above a setting of 1.7 seems to be causing problems with the board.
 
you tell him , also don't forget to get the latest drivers for your vid card just out nvidia 28.32 drivers
 
I had a GA-8IRX. Got rid of it. I did the wire voltage trick to my 1.6A, but no matter what I did and at what speed, one day it would be rock solid stable, the next day it wouldn't boot into Windows except at default, following day stable again highly overclocked. Got tired of it, so now am using an MSI 645 Ultra. So far it seems to always stay stable. I, too, deceived myself about the Gigabyte board. I read up on the specs of the 8IRX and 8IRXP, and on paper it seems the difference was just lack of the add-ons such as NIC, RAID, USB 2.0. I think Gigabyte is doing this on purpose, just like Shuttle crippled the voltage on the AK31A board, but has it working on the AK35GT board.



<< disabling raid and usb2 in the bios >>


benjamat, you may have forgotten to disable the 8IRXP onboard NIC in BIOS. That may be why your NIC didn't work.
 
Thanks for the replies everybody.

I have now fixed the voltage on my P4 1.6a at 1.7 (reads 1.72 0 and the system is running rock stable at 2.2Ghz with the standard 81RX bios Rev-6.

In spite of the issues I have discussed i am now very happy with the mobo and my setup and in hindsight all that was needed was a wire trick to make everything run perfectly. I see no reason to flash the bios to the 81RXP version.

Thanks again.
 
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