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)

Features:

Looking at the I/O configuration of the board, we see that it has two PS/2 ports, two serial ports, a parallel port, audio jacks, a game/MIDI port, two USB ports, and a LAN port. We were surprised to find that there are no IEEE 1394  FireWire ports on the motherboard but there is a port on an extra peripheral card. Also there is no S/PDIF connection on the motherboard but it is also provided on a peripheral card.

One feature of  the motherboard is that it does have Dual BIOS support, which Gigabyte has been putting on most of their recent mainboards. The Dual BIOS is nice because if one BIOS fails, the other one is automatically used to boot up the system. Then from the "good" BIOS, the other can be flashed to restore it to a working condition. Users that are paranoid of bad flashes, BIOS corruption, etc., will no longer have any worries with this feature. Also we tested the dual BIOS and it does work. At first it appeared that the second BIOS was not going to kick in, but it just took awhile and the system was working again with no problems.

Onboard audio has become very common on motherboards. Most of the recent boards all support onboard sound. Gigabyte uses the Realtek ALC650 to provide the 6-channel audio. The sound provided by this chip is not the greatest quality but it should suit average users. People who spend a lot of money on high quality speakers probably will want to purchase a separate sound card.

The Silicon Image Sil3112A provides the onboard Serial ATA functions. It supports up to two independent drives. Only RAID1 or RAID0 can be used. The one downside is that even though the chip does support 150 MB/sec transfer rates, it is still bound to the PCI bus limiting it to only being able to really transfer data at 133 MB/sec. SATA is a nice addition to any motherboard since it does support the new drives using smaller cables and an overall cleaner setup and look. The ITE IT8212F chip gives the motherboard it's IDE RAID capabilities. The chip supports two IDE channels and up to four IDE devices. This provides support for RAID 0/1/0+1 configurations. IDE RAID is still a cheaper solution when compared to a SCSI RAID setup and the performance is still good. This board would do fine for small server/workstation applications with it's Serial ATA and IDE RAID support..

Gigabyte decided to use the VIA VT6306 to give the board IEEE 1394 FireWire support. This allows for the connection of FireWire devices such as video cameras, hard drives, and printers. The chip supports up to three independent devices. In the bundle, only one FireWire port can be found on the extra peripheral card. More ports could have been provided but most people do not have that many IEEE 1394 devices.

Gigabit LAN is provided by the Intel 82540EM chip. The controller supports 10/100/1000 data transfer rates. Not many users will be able to fully utilize the capabilities of the 82540EM but it is still a very nice feature. Currently support for Gigabit LAN is low but it will definitely become more widespread in the future.

Overall, the Gigabyte 8PE800 Ultra is a very feature rich board. Serial ATA support along with the IDE RAID capabilities makes this board great for data transferring and storage. Also providing the Gigabit LAN, this board has the potential to be a nice server/workstation. Other things such as IEEE 1394 FireWire and the Dual BIOS are also nice additions. To say the board is fully loaded might be an understatement since many users do not expect all of these features to come with their motherboards.