Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 236 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

The first go at overclocking a new chipset is always exciting, but unpredictable too. Intel's chipsets have historically been solid overclockers, so we were interested to see what we would get out of this more mainstream of the company's two newest offerings. Gigabyte does not have the greatest reputation for hardware overclocking, but their boards have been getting better at this hobby recently, so we had some high hopes for the GA-8I945P Pro.

All the necessary options are contained within the M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) section of the BIOS, though seeing that the GA-8I945P Pro uses an Intel processor, CPU multiplier was not a factor. We set the system memory to 200MHz and began raising the FSB of the motherboard 5-10MHz at a time.

The first problems occurred at 230MHz FSB, when the system started spontaneously rebooting on startup. Increasing FSB voltage by +0.2 and CPU voltage to 1.3V cured this, but we still experienced instability in 3DMark 2005. ultimately, we had to increase FSB by +0.3V and Vcore to 1.35V before we could complete our test benchmarks and continue.

Sadly, we couldn't get much further, as no amount of tweaking would push the Gigabyte GA-8I945P Pro past 236MHz FSB with its Intel P4 D 840 processor. The board would reset the FSB to 200MHz every time. A speed of 236MHz is not bad at all though, especially for a motherboard and processor based on brand new silicon. We'd consider this a positive result for the GA-8I945P Pro and a good sign for the future of the 945P chipset.

Inside the GA-8I945P Pro BIOS

The familiar blue screen of the Award BIOS here. Like most gigabyte boards, pressing CTRL+F1 at the main BIOS screen will enable several advanced options such as the 'Top Performance' setting and many extra entries in the 'advanced BIOS settings' screen.

Most of the interesting overclocking options are contained within the M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) screen. By enabling the CPU Host Clock Control option, you can type in your desired FSB speed from 100-600MHz. Voltage for memory, FSB, PCI and CPU can be increased using the respective 'overvoltage' controls here too. memory can be cranked up to a maximum of +0.6V, FSB to +0.35V and the CPU to +1.6V. As you can see, most of the important memory settings are also on this page, making it your one stop overclocking shop.

Interestingly, though hyperthreading is not present on Pentium D CPUs, disabling hyperthreading (which is enabled by default) on the GA-8I945P Pro caused Windows and CPU-Z to only see and use one core on our processor.

Like most Gigabyte boards, the Dual-BIOS option is present on the GA-8I945P Pro and can be accessed by pressing F8 at the BIOS screen. Gigabyte's Q-BIOS flashing utility is also present on this menu, and is extremely easy to use.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: intel pentium 4 d 840 intel pentium 4 540 clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz motherboards: albatron px925xe pro-r (925xe)* gigabyte ga-8anxp-d (925x)* msi 915p neo2 platinum (915p)* dfi lanparty 875p-t (i875p)** asrock 775v88 (pt880)** ecs rs400-a (rs400)* via pt894 ref motherboard (pt894)* aopen i915pa-plf (915p)* gigabyte ga-8n-sli royal (nf4-sli ie)* gigabyte ga-8i945p pro (945p)** videocard: msi rx800xt-vtd256e* asus x800xt/vtd** memory: 2x 512mb crucial ballistix pc5300 ddr2 hard drive: 40gb western digital special ed 74gb western digital raptor sata cdrom: aopen combo 52x powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w software setup windowsxp via 4in1 4.55v forceware 6.53 catalyst 5.4 workstation benchmarks sysmark 2004 business winstone 2004 content creation 2004 super pi sisoft sandra 2005 pcmark04 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 aquamark3 comanche 4 x2: the threat ut2003 ut2004 doom 3

pcstats has upgraded its test platform with a couple of 74gb western digital WD740 Raptor hard drives, replacing the trusty 40GB WD IDE HDDs as test drives. Please keep that in mind when viewing the office and disk benchmarks. Also note that this board was tested with the Intel Pentium 4 D 840 CPU, while the remaining reference boards were tested with an Intel Pentium 4 540 CPU; both are clocked at 3.2GHz.