Gigabyte's GA8TX i850 Pentium 4 Motherboard

By Dave Altavilla
1/10/2001

 
The GA-8TX was a breeze to set up.  As we mentioned, the motherboard will fit into any standard ATX case without modification.  So things were pretty much plug and play.
 

Installation and Setup Simplicity

Also as we noted before, the board has a dip switch bank for setting front side bus settings.  We set it to 100MHz., which is the standard for the P4 which then is multiplied by 4 with the i850's "Quad Pumped" clocking architecture.  So we were actually dialed with a 400MHz. System Bus.  We plugged in all our connections, including the ATX12V connector and we were ready to boot.

That's when we noticed other "differences" with the GA-8TX.

Alright then, here are the notables.  First, no FSB Speed options are available in the GA-8TX BIOS.  Again, these are all controlled by dip switches and you can select 100, 105, 110 and 133MHz.  However, there are two setting in this BIOS that we haven't seen yet in either the Asus P4T or Intel D850GB.  First, "DMA Collection Buffer" is an option available to enable or disable.  Since any amount of DMA Buffering in memory is probably beneficial, we left it enabled. 

Also, there is a "Over RIMM Voltage" setting available in the BIOS.  This may or may not come in handy with respect to over-clocking the memory bus.  In addition, because this board has no CPU Core Voltage Adjustments, the upside for over-clocking with the GA-8TX may be minimal.

So, we decided to crank the GA-8TX up as far above spec as we could see how it handled things.

Overclocking With The Gigabyte GA-8TX A little light in this department

As you can see in the above shot, we got the GA-8TX up to a 110MHz. Front Side Bus with a System Bus of 440MHz.  This was actually better than we expected with a total of 150MHz. over the stock speed of our test CPU.  On the other hand, this particular processor has hit 1735MHz. with full stability on the Asus P4T.

Let's move out to some benchmarks.
 

Sandra, Winstone, Q3 and More