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)

Board Layout:

The arrangement of the components on the motherboard is good. The power connections are located on the far right side of the motherboard. This is the ideal placement since it will keep the 20-pin ATX connector from interfering with the heat sink. There is also a decent amount of spacing around the socket, so a large heat sink can be used. Everything on this motherboard is also color coded. This is the most colorful board we have ever seen. All of the different IDE channels are colored along with the AGP slots, DIMM slots, USB connections, etc. Gigabyte has designed this board to be user friendly and using the colored connections makes installation easy on non-experienced users. Even the connections for the front panel power button, LEDs, and reset switch are color coded. The positive pins have also been marked with plus signs. This is nice for anyone who has had to try and figure out which pins to connect the right cables..

An active cooling solution is used to cool the Northbridge. Running at 200 MHz FSB, the Northbridge will get hot and the active cooling will cool much better when compared to a passive heat sink. The fan attached to the heat sink is not going to be noisy because it is small and does not rotate very fast. The use of this type of cooling might aid in overclocking and prolonging the life of the Northbridge.

The only complaint that we have with the motherboard's design is the positioning of the AGP slot with respect to the DIMM slots. The AGP is very close to the DIMMs and makes memory removal impossible if a card video card is in the slot. A Radeon 9700 Pro was being used at the time the picture below was taken. It is not a very long video card but it clearly blocks removal of memory placed in DIMM slot 1. A longer video card such as the 9800 Pro or GeForce 4 TI4800 will cover almost all the DIMM slots. This is inconvenient for users who are always in their cases switching out memory.