Review Conclusion of Gigabyte GA-EP45 Extreme Intel P45 chipset mainboard review

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Review Conclusion of Gigabyte GA-EP45 Extreme Intel P45 chipset mainboard review
Bluetooth 11 Jul 2008

Conclusion

Gigabyte has put up another elegant high end model based on the Intel P45 chipset. Although it may not have the bell & whistles on the EP45-DQ6, this model does have what it takes to be the next dream board of choice for Gigabyte users.

From the benchmarks, we have seen that this board does perform similar to the X48 board in CrossFire, in some cases, just a bit behind. When it comes to single card performance, 3D benchmarks clearly shows that the BIOS requires further tuning to maximise performance.

This board has plenty of features. They include DDR2-1200, CrossFire (dual 8x), additional PCIe x4 slot, 2 GbE with teaming and fail over, Dolby Home theater audio with ALC889A. It also has a water cooling connectors support + Hybrid silent pipe. It also has a BIOS has one of the largest CPU CLK range of up to 1200MHz, plus multiple over voltage controls. The board also has DES Advanced featuring hardware based Dynamic 6-Gear switching. Advanced power phase design with virtual 12 power phases to provides highly efficient operation for 45nm CPU. IT also has a 2 power phases for NB chipset and 2 phases for memory power to excel at power efficiency.

It might not be new to most but the addition of Power/reset/Clr CMOS onboard button is a plus. I also liked the the Debug LED and OV-Alert LED, OC-Alert LED, TMP-Alert LED allows user to easily catch on to PC status.

In terms of overclocking, the BIOS comes pretty complete with large range of FSB and voltage options available. You can see the BIOS options here. To avoid overclocking CPU with a high RAM clk due to the CPU:MEM ratio, you can choose the FSB strap within bios. In our o/c test, we used a E6550 processor that clocks at 7x333 and o/c it by lowering the multiplier to 6x and increase the cpu clk to 500 MHz by BIOS and raised it up to 561 MHz using EasyTuner 6. Vdimm, Vcore, MCH core was increased to 1.45v , 2.34v and 1.36v.

In conclusion, this board excels in specifications, it has almost everything that a overclocker would go for. Unfortunately, the BIOS still require a bit more work to get it tuned for performance and overclocking.

BIOS used : F5E. For beta bios, please visit http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs

Discuss

Pros

Overclocking features
EasyTune 6
1394
Hybrid Cooler
Advanced DES

Cons

no eSATA
no WIFI/AP
Performance

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	9 / 10
Features	10 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	10 / 10
Documentation	8 / 10
Packaging	10 / 10
Cost / Performance	7 / 10
Overall Rating :	9.14/ 10

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