Gigabyte 845E / G boards - 8IEXP and 8IGX

[WangButter]

Well, looks like Gigabyte has jumped into the 845 E / G fray with a couple of new boards. This review looks pretty promising, although they don't say anything about memory dividers or overclocking performance...

 

[Pardus]

Toms Hardware did a review on 9 p4 board, gigabyte won. After reading this review, I went with the GA-8IEXP over the Abit BD7-II Raid.

Here

 

[benjamin]

I picked up an 8IEXP today, with a P4 1.8A, and my god it runs nicely.

I can't really back that up though cause I haven't run an OS on it yet - I forgot to recompile my linux kernel with P4 support (nice one Ben), cause my last system was an Athlon one, and I didn't realy feel like installing Win2K.

However, just to try it out, I clocked the bus at 133 (that pushes the 1.8 to 2.4) and it POSTed, BIOSed and ran my bootloader perfectly. I didn't overvolt it at all (the voltage was actually at only 1.49) and the RAM (KingMax PC2700) was at 354 (FSB X 2.66) and it was all sweet, at least for what I was doing. It'll certainly be interesting to see if it gets to windows, and is stable, without upping the voltage or pulling the RAM back.

But so far it looks good - I'll post more around these forums when I've had a chance to get Linux/Win2K up and running.

 

[raddygast]

Can someone who has this board comment on whether it is possible to lock the PCI/AGP bus? Like the Abit BD7-II, where you can fix PCI/AGP at 33/66 regardless of what you set FSB to? That's very important to me.

 

[benjamin]

Yes, I can confirm that. I have the 8IEXP and I was pleasantly surprised to find that BIOS option. : )

 

[FrancesBeansRevenge]

Originally posted by: benjamin
I picked up an 8IEXP today, with a P4 1.8A, and my god it runs nicely.

I can't really back that up though cause I haven't run an OS on it yet - I forgot to recompile my linux kernel with P4 support (nice one Ben), cause my last system was an Athlon one, and I didn't realy feel like installing Win2K.

However, just to try it out, I clocked the bus at 133 (that pushes the 1.8 to 2.4) and it POSTed, BIOSed and ran my bootloader perfectly. I didn't overvolt it at all (the voltage was actually at only 1.49) and the RAM (KingMax PC2700) was at 354 (FSB X 2.66) and it was all sweet, at least for what I was doing. It'll certainly be interesting to see if it gets to windows, and is stable, without upping the voltage or pulling the RAM back.

But so far it looks good - I'll post more around these forums when I've had a chance to get Linux/Win2K up and running.

Huh? FSB x 2.66?.... that works out to be the 3:4 divider.... I thought the Gigabyte 845E/G boards didn't have the memory divider.... it seems to... just expressed differently 🙂

I love Gigabyte boards and would prefer to get one but I havent been able to find hard evidence of the memory dividers.

 

[benjamin]

I get quite confused with these memory dividers, but I can tell you that e.g. if I am running a 100MHz bus, I can run the memory at 100 MHz DDR or 133 MHz DDR (200 or 266 effective, hence X2.00 or X2.66).

Also, I'm starting to do some overclocking and I've found

a) my RAM is crap
b) my heatsink is crap

the ram pukes at 354MHz, and it's PC2700, so it's rated to 333.. my god that sucks.

And if I run at 2.4GHz at 1.6 volts, I start getting beeping because the procesor hits 60 degrees. Either I messed up the arctic silver (which I may have done) or this heatsink sucks (which I think it does 🙂 )

What heatsinks are you all using, and what temps do you get? (on what processors?)

i keep noticing typos so I keep editing 😀