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Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8IEXP Review :: Features
The 845E accepts DDR200/266 memory modules. We are used to 3 GB of memory support, but Gigabyte has chosen to support only 2GB for reliability issues. Intel does not want to support UDMA 133 because Serial ATA is around the corner, but Gigabyte added the Promise PDC20276 to the equation. So now you have 2 more channels of UDMA 133. Each channel supports 2 ATA devices up to a total of 4, and it supports Raid 0, 1, 0+1.
The Southbridge(ICH4) has native support for 6 ports of USB 2.0 and is enough for most users. Two ports are located in the back of the motherboard and there is an additional bracket for four more ports. You will see the headers for brackets, both for USB and Firewire ports.
For video camera and recording enthusiasts (99.99% Japan), Firewire is important. Most of the new Sony cameras are armed with this port. Digital connections are making life easier for them. You don't have to worry about quality loss as in analog connection. Plug it in, open your favorite video editing software, and you are on. Three ports of Firewire with its additional bracket, is available on the Gigabyte GA-8IEXP. They used the VIA6306 chip for Firewire support. It is interesting to see both VIA and Intel names on the motherboard. These days even for an entry level motherboard, networking is necessary. For business or home, Broadband internet or home networking purposes, it is a must. Some of the networking functions are embedded in the chipset. The INTEL 82562ET LAN PHY chip is included for a 100 MBits Fast Ethernet connection.
On-board audio solutions are getting more advanced every day. Buyers who are considering buying 5.1 Digital soundcards need to think twice. This board supports 5+1 sound with the Creative CT5880-DEQ chip. There is an additional bracket in the package for digital RCA and optical out. For internal audio connections, a Digital-IN (SPDIF) header was added to the motherboard in addition to the standard CD and AUX-IN headers. Some CD-ROM's have digital out connectors for better quality sound output. You can find this luxury addition only on some expensive cards. Standard digital playback over the IDE cable is possible for some media players but this addition doesn't hurt.
The classical Dual BIOS from Gigabyte is on the board. When you are flashing the BIOS, any power failure, or wrong timing when resetting the system, may render the motherboard unbootable. A virus like the nasty CIH (Chernobyl) may corrupt your BIOS data and your system may not even show the POST screen. The Gigabyte motherboards second BIOS will take over in these kinds of situations, and will boot. It is easy to repair the first BIOS. In the BIOS menu, you can easily copy the second BIOS over the first one. For other motherboards, you have to send it for technical service.
You will see Winbond W83L518D chip or Smart@I/O with its marketing name on the motherboard. Memory Stick / Security Digital (MMC) / Smart Card Reader connectors are lined up on the motherboard. You may want to find and add necessary reader front bay drives for transferring digital camera photos or data.
This is one of the best motherboards I have seen for overclocking. Even the chipset fan is massive and seemed to be begging me to "overclock the hell out of this board".
That was just the beginning. There was a very detailed configuration menu in BIOS for performance settings. You may start with the frequency menu. You can change the bus frequency from 100 MHz to 355 MHz by 1 MHz steppings. 355 MHz is overkill but you just feel good seeing it.
If you like to pump more power to your CPU, you can change its voltage from 1.5 to 1.725 V by 0.025 V steppings. When you increase the frequency to overclock, you need more power for your memory and AGP slot. It is possible to pump them additional 0.1 - 0.2 or 0.3V of current by AGP and DIMM Over voltage control settings in the BIOS.
I saved the best overclocking features for the last. You can fix the PCI or AGP frequency on this motherboard. When you increase bus frequency for overclocking, you increase AGP and PCI frequencies as well. The CPU can handle more frequency, but your AGP and PCI cards may not handle extreme overclocking. If you can increase the CPU frequency while AGP and PCI frequency stay as constant, you may be able to overclock more. You can not find this feature on most of the other motherboards. These features make the Gigabyte GA-8IEXP extremely overclockable.
The Easy Tune utility makes it possible to overclock right away without booting up and getting in to BIOS. Easy Tune version 3.0 is a well working release. Version 4 trial version looks really cool. But we can not say that it is stable yet.
CPU burning is not an issue for Intel CPU's, because protection is native in the CPU. But necessary alarm settings for overheating and fan failure were in the BIOS.
You can find a lot of nice utilities along with valuable Norton Antivirus 2002 and Norton Personal Firewall 2002 in the driver CD. Live BIOS update feature is very handy. For a DOS Flash BIOS update, you have to boot the system without TSR or settings to update the BIOS. But if your system is updating BIOS inside your OS, you don't need to know anything about it at all. The Gigabyte Utility is one of the easiest to use.
I am always envious when I see full screen logos of large manufacturers on PC boot. Some of the motherboard manufacturers have utilities that you can add logos to BIOS. The face wizard utility is the easiest one I have ever seen. You can add 640x480 256 colors of a bitmap file you created before. It leads you step by step in Windows. You can add it directly to BIOS or a BIOS image file on your disk to flash it later. Or you can create many BIOS's with different logos for your taste. It is possible to preview before flashing. It looks better in DOS mode than Windows. The box is one of the richest boxes I have ever seen. The parts marked with an asterisk were missing from our sample, but we saw them from other resources and their existence was confirmed in the manual. Package Contents:
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