Gigabyte GA 8I945P review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 23 Jun 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

As components get faster, new motherboard chipsets are needed to support them.

Gigabyte's GA 8I945P motherboard debuts Intel's i945P chipset, a new mainstream product that supports dual-core processors, chips with a faster 1,066MHz front-side bus and 667MHz DDR2 RAM.

The GA 8I945P supports these improvements with its LGA 775 socket and four DIMM slots. It also has four SATA ports, three PCI, two x1 PCI-E and a x16 PCI-E. The SATA ports can be used to put hard disks in a RAID array for better performance or data protection. There's also the usual complement of USB 2.0 and FireWire ports, Gigabit Ethernet and high-definition eight-channel audio.

We tested it using a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1GB of Crucial 533MHz DDR2 memory in a dual-channel configuration. It achieved a score of 145 in our Shopper application benchmarks and 5,438 in PCMark04. While these are fast scores, they're slightly slower than those of Gigabyte's nForce 4-based GA-8N SLI Royal, which we reviewed in What's New, Shopper July 2005.

Not only does that board support dual-core processors, 1,066MHz FSB processors and 667MHz DDR2 RAM, it also supports SLI graphics cards and has nVidia's hardware firewall, making it much more flexible.

The GA 8I945P's only advantage is that it's almost £30 cheaper. Even so, we'd rather pay the extra money to get the better-performing, feature-packed nForce 4-based motherboard instead.

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