Gigabyte 8PE800 Ultra

Company: Gigabyte
Product: 8PE800 Ultra
Street Price: ~$145 USD
Date Reviewed: May 13, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao
Overall Rating: (8.7/10)

Introduction:

Intel has released their latest Pentium 4's that are designed to run on an 800 MHz FSB. With the new processor release also came the new chipset, 875P, that supports dual channel memory as well as 800 MHz FSB. Recently motherboard manufacturers have released motherboards based on the older 845PE chipset. These mainboards are supposed to be able to support 800 MHz FSB through overclocking. We tested the ABIT BH7 awhile back and it was able to use the new CPU by overclocking, since the 845PE chipset only officially supports 533/400 MHz FSB.

Today we look at the Gigabyte 8PE800 Ultra motherboard, based on the Intel 845PE chipset. Though the board does not have all the features the 875P has, it is able to use the latest processors from Intel. Also there are performance increases from moving from the 533 MHz FSB to the 800 MHz bus. Read on and see how well the board performs and the features it has to offer.

Specifications:

• Processor
  Socket 478 for Intel® Pentium® 4 with HT Technology

• Chipset
  Intel® 82845PE MCH
  Intel® 82801DB ICH4
  Intel® 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
  Silicon Image Sil3112A chip
  GigaRAID controller chip
  VIA 6306 IEEE1394 controller chip
  Realtek ALC650E Audio AC'97 CODEC
  Super I/O: ITE I/O IT8712F chip
  2 x 4M bit flash ROM

• Front Side Bus
  533/400 MHz FSB

• Memory
  Type: DDR 266/333 ( PC2100/2700) Non-ECC
  3 x DIMM
  Max capacity: Up to 2 GB

•  Internal I/O Connectors
  1 x FDD
  2 x Serial ATA
  2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE
  2 x IEEE 1394
  2 x UDMA ATA 100/66 Bus Master IDE
  2 x USB 2.0 (4 ports by cable with rear USB bracket)
  S/P DIF input/output (with rear bracket)
  3 x cooling fan pin headers
  CD/AUX in

• Expansion Slots
  1 x AGP 4x, supports 1.5v display card only.
  5 x PCI (PCI 2.2 compliant)

• Rear Panel I/O
  2 x USB 2.0 ports
  1 x RJ45 LAN port
  1 x LPT
  2 x COM ports
  Audio (1 x Line-in / 1 x Line-out / 1 x MIC) connector
  PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse connector
  1 x Game/Midi port

• CPU/AGP/DIMM setting
  CPU FSB / Multiplier / Vcore Voltage adjustable via BIOS
  AGP Voltage / Clock adjustable via BIOS
  DIMM Voltage / Clock adjustable via BIOS

• Form Factor
  ATX
  30.5cm x 24.4cm

• H/W Monitoring
  System health status auto-detect and report by BIOS
  H/W detect and report power-in voltage, CPU voltage, and Fan speed