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)

Overclocking:

We decided to use a Intel Pentium 4 3.0C processor for our overclocking. This board unofficially should support this CPU but to do so requires overclocking. We had no problems at all reaching 200 MHz by using the stock voltages and timings in the BIOS. The only thing we did was just lock the AGP/PCI bus and overclock the FSB to 200. The system was totally stable in Windows and we even ran all of our testing at this speed.

Overclocking past 200 MHz FSB gave us a few problems. Anything over 200 would not run stable. Random reboots and blues screens occurred no matter what voltages we applied to the memory or the CPU. This is interesting because the board had no problems at all at 200 FSB. The board is not a bad overclocker considering it is supposed to run at 133 FSB but we had it at 200 FSB stable.

This is what we can say about the overclocking. Using a Pentium 4 based on the 533/400 MHz FSB will have no problems overclocking on this motherboard except for the low voltage options. Using the newer 800 MHz FSB processors might cause problems since the system has to be overclocked to have the processor running at it stock speed. The board can definitely support the P4 800 MHz FSB chips and is more affordable than the current 875P (Canterwood) motherboards. We suggest that if the newer processor are to be used, and overclocked, that one look into the 875P chipset, which officially supports these chips. Here is a link to the Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra, based on the 875P chipset.

Testing Setup:

All of our testing was done with a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz (800 MHz FSB) CPU with Hyperthreading enabled. Most people already know what the performance of the 845PE chipset is at stock so we thought it would be nice to see how it performs compared to the newer 875P chipset and the ABIT BH7 (845PE) clocked to 200MHz FSB. The memory timings used with each test system were all set to 2-6-2-2 and were run in synchronous mode. For the 845PE motherboards, we used one 512MB stick of Kingston HyperX PC3500. In the 875P board, we used 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS Platinum PC3500 and in a dual channel configuration.