Unreal Tournament 2004	Source: Epic

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the sequel to the highly popular UT2003 and uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology. Unreal Tournament 2004 employs the use of Vertex and Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a DirectX 9 videocard if you plan to play competitively.

UT2004
dm-rankin	FPS	Ranking
Albatron PX925XE Pro-R (925XE 200/533)	90.83
Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D (i925X 200/533)	90.13
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (i915P 200/533)	83.48
DFI LANParty 875P-T (i875P 200/400)	83.47
ASRock 775V88 (PT880 200/400)	79.47
VIA PT894 Ref Motherboard (PT894 200/533)	85.04
AOpen i915Pa-PLF (915P 200/400)	90.61
Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal (NF4-SLI 200/533)	85.21
ECS RS400-A (RS400 200/400)	74.79
Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro (945P 200/400)	80.45
as-convoy	FPS	Ranking
Albatron PX925XE Pro-R (925XE 200/533)	61.57
Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D (i925X 200/533)	64.81
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (i915P 200/533)	57.92
DFI LANParty 875P-T (i875P 200/400)	61.11
ASRock 775V88 (PT880 200/400)	52.71
VIA PT894 Ref Motherboard (PT894 200/533)	57.8
AOpen i915Pa-PLF (915P 200/400)	61.34
Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal (NF4-SLI 200/533)	54.7
ECS RS400-A (RS400 200/400)	48.47
Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro (945P 200/400)	50.31
ctf-bridgeoffate	FPS	Ranking
Albatron PX925XE Pro-R (925XE 200/533)	127.42
Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D (i925X 200/533)	134.09
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (i915P 200/533)	119.36
DFI LANParty 875P-T (i875P 200/400)	129.77
ASRock 775V88 (PT880 200/400)	110.07
VIA PT894 Ref Motherboard (PT894 200/533)	118.76
AOpen i915Pa-PLF (915P 200/400)	126.4
Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal (NF4-SLI 200/533)	120.5
ECS RS400-A (RS400 200/400)	103.1
Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro (945P 200/400)	106.24

The Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro trails behind most of the field in UT2004, which requires high memory bandwidth for good scores. Again, the Pentium D's dual-core nature does not seem to help in gaming situations.

Doom 3	Source: id Software

Doom 3 is the most advanced game to date. it takes advantage of the latest videocard technology and pushes the processing power of the CPU to its absolute limit. At its highest setting, Ultra quality, texture sizes pass the 500MB mark which means even tomorrow's videocards will have a hard time running everything. The frame rates in the game itself are locked at 60 fps so anything above that point is wasted. Each test is run three times with the third run being recorded.

Doom3
LQ 640x480:	FPS	Ranking
Albatron PX925XE Pro-R (925XE 200/533)	84.4
Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D (i925X 200/533)	88.5
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (i915P 200/533)	83.6
DFI LANParty 875P-T (i875P 200/400)	81.4
ASRock 775V88 (PT880 200/400)	79.5
VIA PT894 Ref Motherboard (PT894 200/533)	78.1
AOpen i915Pa-PLF (915P 200/400)	83.3
Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal (NF4-SLI 200/533)	85.3
ECS RS400-A (RS400 200/400)	76
Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro (945P 200/400)	93.1

After some uninspiring gaming results, the Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro goes out with a bang, posting a great result in the most demanding of our 3D benchmarks, Doom 3. Whether it's the dual-core nature of the Pentium D 840 processor or the motherboard and chipset that's responsible, the GA-8I945P Pro scores almost 10FPS higher than the nearest competitor!

A solid mainstream platform for the new Intel processors

The Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro was the first Intel 945P chipset motherboard we've had a chance to look at, and coupled with a fast Pentium D 840 processor it made a good case for itself as a mainstream solution. Like most of Gigabyte's products, the GA-8I945P Pro comes with a great bundle including everything you need to get the motherboard up and running. The accompanying manual is excellent, as is the component layout of the board.

The Intel 945P chipset supports Intel's new line of dual-core Pentium D processors, providing the means for mainstream systems to incorporate dual-core CPUs for business and content creation applications, areas where the dual CPUs can have the largest impact. The GA-8I945P Pro posted some good system benchmark scores, setting new records in SysMark2004, Sandra and PCMark04. There's no doubt that this motherboard makes a potent workstation, even for applications that are not necessarily multi-thread aware.

The Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro's gaming performance was a little less straightforward. While it posted leading scores on 3DMark05 and Doom 3 (arguably the two most demanding gaming benchmarks in our test group), its performance in the rest of our gaming benchmarks was uninspiring. This could be a driver issue, and it could also be due to the slightly low memory bandwidth scores the motherboard achieved. Coupled with a Pentium D or Pentium 4 processor and a fast videocard though, the GA-8I945P Pro still makes a more than adequate gaming system, even if it isn't up to Athlon64 standards.

With a retail price of $175CAD (US$145) the Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro has a mainstream price to match its office oriented qualities. Given the extras that the motherboard includes and the fact that the only other desktop Pentium D compatible chipsets out there (955X Express and nForce 4 Intel Edition) are both pricey, this seems like a good deal to us.

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