Competition has always benefitted the end user because it has the effect of driving down prices, and typically increasing the number of features that come standard. With the upsurge in the tech sector these last few months, competition has reached a fevered pitch, and the goal is your hard earned spending money. As the movers and shakers shell out product after product, Gigabyte, who are one of the larger manufacturers in the industry, have been quietly making waves amongst the hardware community.

The Intel CSA network interface offers advantages over other GbE solutions which can saturate the PCI bus.

One such example is the P4 Titan 8PENXP which is based on the mainstream i865PE Springdale chipset. The i865PE chipset has shown that it's a very powerful solution, rival to Intel's i875P in terms of performance! With that in mind, and the relatively low price, it's no wonder manufacturers have multiple boards based on the highly successful i865PE chipset.

But with so much competition, how does Gigabyte separate itself from the rest? Well, for starters the Gigabyte 8PENXP motherboard is possibly one of the most equipped i865PE motherboards on the market.

Standard features of the board consist of Serial ATA/Serial ATA RAID, Ultra 133 IDE RAID, IEEE 1394, 5.1 audio, Intel CSA enabled Gigabit LAN, dual BIOS's and Gigabyte's special DPS2 (Dual Power System).

If you need to add in another device, the five PCI slots and lone 8x AGP Pro Port should be sufficient. The motherboard can support Northwood-based Pentium 4 processors running on a 400/533/800 MHz FSB and can handle up to 4GB of dual channel PC1600/2100/2700/3200 non ECC DDR RAM.

gigabyte p4 titan 8penxp
	Ships with the following: 3x Ultra/133 Cables 5x Serial ATA Cables FDD Cable Driver CD I/O Back Plate Users Manual RAID User Manuals Quick Installation Guide WinDVD Suite
	Brackets:
	USB 2.0 Bracket IEEE 1394 Bracket Audio Bracket External Serial ATA Bracket

All Gigabyte motherboards are blue in colour, and as you an see they like to colour coordinate the system headers and connectors. The GA-8PENXP is a larger board so you may have problems fitting it into those smaller cramped Mid Tower ATX cases, of course that's expect with all the on board features.

The layout of the 8PENXP is good - you're not going to have to remove the videocard when you install system memory! The main ATX, floppy and main IDE channels are in their most ideal location to the right of the DIMM slots. Gigabyte did a great job at placing all the headers (USB, IEEE 1394, etc) at the bottom of the motherboard. This way they do not interfere with any of the other system devices.

Gigabyte brings customer care to another level, they don't just colour code the front panel headers, they also indicate the positive value's as well! How many times have you put together a system only to open up the box again so you can make the Power LED light up?

The 8PENXP's PCB is very well labelled, newbies shouldn't have a single problem attaching another system device or finding out what any given header does.

Gigabyte certainly had a lot of foresight when they decided to equip the 8PENXP with an additional IDE RAID controller! With Serial ATA HDD's still difficult to find (at least around here) and with most users still on regular parallel IDE, it only makes sense to include another IDE controller.

Gigabyte has probably the best software bundle of all motherboards. They include Norton Internet Security 2003 with their 8PENXP and that consists of Norton AntiVirus 2003, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Privacy Control, Norton Spam Alert and Norton Parental Control. Nice to see some useful utilities bundled for a change.