Gigabyte GA-G1975X G1-Turbo Motherboard
Testing Setup and SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults". The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests. We should note, however, that whether we left the board at its default settings or manually configured the FSB at 200MHz, the G1975X ran our CPU a bit higher than its default clock speed.
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Motherboards Tested: Gigabyte GA-G1975X (Intel i975X Express) Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal (nForce 4 SLI X16 Intel Edition) MSI P4N Diamond (nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition) Asus P5WD2 Premium (Intel i955X) Common Hardware: Intel Pentium 4 550 Processor @ 3.4GHz 2x512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2-667 (CL 4-4-4-12) Gigabyte GeForce 7800GT On-board audio & LAN Seagate Barracuda V SATA Hard Drive
Software / System Drivers: |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite of benchmarks. All of these tests were run with the GA-G1975X powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4 GHz CPU with 1GB of Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 and compared against similar systems from SANDRA's database.
;) CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) Memory Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
We decided on using scores that reflect not only comparable single CPU performance, but dual Core CPUs as well to show the benefit that one might have obtained with such a piece installed in the G1975X. It can readily be seen that performance nearly doubles (as one might expect). The single CPU scores are also slightly higher than SANDRA's reference scores, but aggressive clocking on Gigabyte's part can easily explain the difference. We couldn't find an exact match for the memory benchmark, but performance-wise the 975X chipset seems to provide a little more bandwidth than previous Intel boards.
