Even though the Gigabyte
P4 Titan GA-8PE800 was not the highest performing i845PE motherboard we have
tested, it's easily one of the best value boards on the market and with good
performance characteristics to match. With
a retail price of just $145 CDN ($90 US), there's no other motherboard in its
price class that I can think of that offers more for your money.
In terms of on board goodies, the motherboard has Intel
Gigabit LAN, IEEE 1394, IDE RAID, USB2.0, Serial ATA/Serial ATA RAID, 5.1 audio
and dual BIOS's. Despite all the on board components, Gigabyte was still able to
include five PCI slots!
Gigabyte
takes customer care to the next level, they
not just colour code the front panel headers they also label the positive wire
for you! All the rest of the headers (USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, Serial ATA, etc) are
all located at the edge of the PCB which means that all the extra wires to the
brackets will not interfere with the other system devices. Gigabyte include virtually
everything you will need to take advantage of the on board components, including a molex to 15 pin
serial ATA power connector adaptor.
My only
real qualm with the motherboard is that there are Advanced Chipset
options in the BIOS. Without the ability to change the memory timings (SPD on
the memory is 2-3-3-6) the Gigabyte P4 Titan GA-8PE800 Ultra's performance
suffered a little. As a result, it came in
towards to bottom of the boards we compared it against in most
of the benchmarks. The available voltage adjustments also seemed a bit low; a maximum
of 1.6V means that the more hardcore overclockers will have to modify
the processor for more voltage if they really need it. This won't affect average
consumers at all of course, so this doesn't count against the board in
our overall opinion.
All in
all, the Gigabyte P4 Titan GA-8PE800 Ultra is a great motherboard for consumers
to consider. You probably wouldn't want to use the
motherboard in your 3DMark/benchmarking machine but it will certainly do the job just
fine in your main rig. Stability is good, and feature-wise the blue board
is literally packed!
Find out about this and many
other reviews by joining the Weekly PCstats.com Newsletter today!
Related Articles:
Here are a few other articles that you might enjoy
as well...
1. Abit IT7 MAX2 Rev2 i845PE Motherboard
Review
RSS Newsletter
