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Gigabyte GA-8KNXP i875P Motherboard Review
Gigabyte GA-8KNXP i875P Motherboard Review  - PCSTATS
We're testing Gigabyte's GA-8KNXP. The GA-8KNXP is based on the i875P chipset and the board has native support for Serial ATA/Serial ATA RAID, Ultra/133 RAID, IEEE 1394, GbE LAN, and 5.1 audio.
 84% Rating:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: Gigabyte Sep 21 2003   C. Sun  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > Gigabyte GA-8KNXP

The BIOS

Despite having a whole load of integrated features we were happy to find the 8KNXP still has five PCI slots for expansion.

I never really appreciated dual BIOS's until I accidentally killed a motherboard with a bad BIOS flash. After two weeks of waiting for the board to be returned, I came to appreciate having a backup BIOS.

The Gigabyte GA-8KNXP prevents situations such as this thanks to a backup BIOS, that cannot be directly flashed by the user. If the primary BIOS is damaged, or corrupted, you can quickly recover it from the second.

Overclocking the 8KNXP

Gigabyte boards have been pretty good to us in the past in terms of overclocking and we were expecting that the GA-8KNXP would as well.

Starting at 200 MHz FSB we began to push the speed up slowly. At 211 MHz FSB we had to raise the DIMM voltage to 2.8V to stabilize the situation. At 220 MHz FSB, the CPU began to flake out, so the voltage was raised to 1.6V.

In the end the Gigabyte 8KNXP would hit 225 MHz FSB, however we had to enable the 5:4 memory divider for the board to be stable.

The 8KNXP maintains access to Advanced Chipset Features, but you must first press CTRL F1 to unlock the options. Once you're inside, you'll find the usual tweaks we'd expect from a performance i875P motherboard. We even have CPC, Fast Chip Select and Dynamic Paging options!

While fast performing and offering a lot of value, Gigabyte seems to be shying away from the enthusiast market. In terms of FSB we can adjust it from 200-355 in 1 MHz increments and we can fine tune the AGP/PCI independent of the FSB. There are the usual 1:1, 5:4 and 3:2 memory dividers and the voltage options are as follows; DDR can go as high as 2.8V, AGP to 1.8V and CPU to 1.6V.

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Contents of Article: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP
 Pg 1.  Gigabyte GA-8KNXP i875P Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  IDE and SATA Raid
 Pg 3.  Six phase power supply
 Pg 4.  — The BIOS
 Pg 5.  System Spec's and Benchmarks
 Pg 6.  Benchmarks: Winbench 99, SiSoft Sandra 2003
 Pg 7.  Benchmarks: PCMark2002, 3DMark2001
 Pg 8.  Benchmarks: AquaMark3, Quake III Arena
 Pg 9.  Benchmarks: UT2003, Conclusions

 
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