 |
| Installation
/ Setup - The GA-6CX i820
Motherboard |
| Leading
edge Intel technology with a
familiar feel |
|
The
GA-6CX was transplanted into our main test-bed
system which historically was on a BX chipset
based motherboard. From there it was clear
sailing. The board has a dip switch that
allows you to set the CPU FSB and a jumper to
allow for 10% overshoot of the CPU core voltage.
You can of course enable or disable on board
sound. This is done via the
BIOS.
Unfortunately
there are no settings for CPU frequency in the
BIOS but the DIP switch approach proved to be
easily accessible. Speaking of the
BIOS, the GA-6CX has AMI BIOS on board which we
have found to be more and more of a rarity these
days. However, this BIOS was very full
featured and intuitive as well as easy to
use. A nice feature on it was the single
key stoke set up of all drives in your system
with the Auto Detect feature. This feature
even detects CDROMs.
Finally,
the board comes with lots of health monitoring
options including fan speed and temp sensors for
both the system or ambient air inside the case
and the CPU itself. These can be enabled
or disabled in the BIOS and there are threshold
values that can be set for each, sounding an
alarm should a critical spec deviate to far from
the limit you set. All told, this is a
very easily configurable board with excellent
compatibility, as far as our test were
concerned.
 |
| Test
System |
| Specs
and Setup |
|
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 533B
overclocked to 600MHz with an FSB of 150MHz..
(supplied by Outside
Loop Computers),
Gigabyte GA-6CX i820 Motherboard,
128MB of 800MHz (400 DDR) Techworks
RDRAM, WD Expert AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard
Drive, Gigabyte GA-MG400, Win 98SE,
DirectX 7, Gigabyte GA-MG400 Drivers Matrox
Version 5.26
It
is important to note that we used 800MHz. RDRAM
on these tests and took full advantage of the
memory bandwidth offered on the i820 platform of
the GA-6CX Motherboard.
By
the way, here is a shameless plug for the good
folks at TECHWORKS!
They are one of the few manufacturers of Intel
certified RAMBUS RIMM modules. Plain
and simple, they rock!
|
| Overclocking
- The GA-6CX i820 Motherboard |
| Stability
under pressure |
|
Not
only did the Pentium!!!533B we used,
overclock easily to 600 MHz. but stability at
default voltage was perfect. This was
something that we have not been able to
accomplish on all motherboards we have tested
with this CPU. Furthermore, if your CPU
needs an extra voltage boost to remain stable
when overclocked, the board does have the
ability, as we noted earlier, to set the core
CPU voltage 10% higher than the CPU
default.
On
the down side, FSB options of only up to 150MHz.
are available via the dip switch settings, which
limited our Pentium to 600MHz. Perhaps we
could have overclocked higher with more
available high speed FSB settings. The
fact that this board utilizes RAMBUS as its main
system memory, gives it an enormous amount of
margin for FSB settings up through 400MHz and
800MHz aggregate bandwidth with Double Data Rate
(DDR) capability. Furthermore, any new
Intel Camino based motherboard with RIMM support
will have this type of headroom. An FSB
setting of 200MHz. with a 1 GHz. Intel
processor, is something that will finally begin
maximize the effective bandwidth of RAMBUS.
Regardless,
the GA-6CX is a competent overclocking set up
with excellent stability.
|
| Benchmarks
- The GA-6CX i820 Motherboard |
| The
i820 cranks it up a notch |
|
| 
