GIGABYTE, for some time has not been at the top of the list for the hard core enthusiast. They do make a very good product. But according to many Overclockers and hardcore gamers they lack stability and BIOS options to really compete in the high-end arena. Now, however, as the market has changed so has GIGABYTE’s focus. It seems that GIGABYTE has jumped on the same “re-create yourself” bandwagon that many hardware manufacturers have and with good reason. The enthusiast and gamers market accounts for the majority of peripheral sales. (Although AMD is working to change this trend with programs like AMD Game) This means that to survive GIGABYTE needs to cater to this cash heavy crowd. Today we have one of GIGABYTE’s P45 DDR3 based boards in the shop; the EP45T-DS3R which boasts performance, energy efficiency and security all in one nice package. Will the EP45T-DS3R deliver?
The answer is just a few clicks away.
Product: GIGABYTE GA-EP45T-DS3R
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: July 29th 2008
Product cost: $174.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff
Discussion Link
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The EP45T’s box is a combination of Green and White, possibly to give it an “Earth Friendly” feel .
On the front of the box is a large graphic depicting one of the major selling points. This is GIGABYTE’s new Advanced Dynamic Energy Saver. (I will cover this later). The rest of the box is covered with the usual logos and graphs showing how much better GIGABYTE are than everyone else. The back of the box is a chaotic mass of images and test declaring the features of the EP45T.
Opening the box we find the EP45T-DS3R securely wrapped in an anti-static bag waiting for us to put it to use.
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The specification and contents of the EP45T-DS3R are listed below (taken from GIGABYTE’s website).
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CPU |
Support for an Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme processor/ Intel®® Core™ 2 Duo processor/ Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processor/Intel® Celeron® L2 cache varies with CPU |
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Front Side Bus |
1600/1333/1066/800 MHz FSB |
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Chipset |
North Bridge: Intel® P45 Express Chipset South Bridge: Intel® ICH10R |
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Memory |
4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory Dual channel memory architecture Support for DDR3 1900 (O.C.)/1600/1333/1066/800 MHz memory modules (Refer to Memory support list for more information) |
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Audio |
Realtek ALC889A codec High Definition Audio 2/4/5.1/7.1-channel Support for Dolby Home Theater Support for S/PDIF In/Out Support for CD In |
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LAN |
2 x Realtek 8111C chips (10/100/1000 Mbit) Support for Teaming |
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Expansion Slots |
1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 3 x PCI Express x1 slot 2 x PCI slots |
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Storage Interface |
South Bridge: 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 JMicron 368 chip: 1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices ITE8718 chip: 1 x floppy disk drive connector supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive |
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IEEE 1394a |
T.I. TSB43AB23 chip Up to 3 IEEE 1394a ports (2 on the back panel, 1 via the IEEE 1394a bracket connected to the internal IEEE 1394a header) |
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USB |
Integrated in the South Bridge Up to 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 on the back panel, 4 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers) |
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Internal I/O Connectors |
1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector 1 x floppy disk drive connector 1 x IDE connector 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors 1 x CPU fan header 2 x system fan headers 1 x power fan header 1 x front panel header 1 x front panel audio header 1 x CD In connector 1 x S/PDIF In header 1 x S/PDIF Out header 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers 1 x IEEE 1394a header 1 x parallel port header 1 x serial port header 1 x power LED header 1 x chassis intrusion header |
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Back Panel Connectors |
1 x PS/2 mouse port 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector 1 x coaxial S/PDIF Out connector 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 2 x IEEE 1394a ports 2 x RJ-45 ports 6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone) |
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I/O Controller |
iTE IT8718 chip |
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H/W Monitoring |
System voltage detection CPU/System temperature detection CPU/System/Power fan speed detection CPU overheating warning CPU/System/Power fan fail warning CPU/System fan speed control |
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BIOS |
2 x 8 Mbit flash Use of licensed AWARD BIOS Support for DualBIOS™ PnP 1.0a, DMI 2.0, SM BIOS 2.4, ACPI 1.0b |
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Unique Features |
Support for @BIOS Support for Q-Flash Support for Dual BIOS Support for Download Center Support for Xpress Install Support for Xpress Recovery2 Support for EasyTune Support for Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced Support for Ultra TPM Support for Time Repair Support for Q-Share |
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Bundle Software |
Norton Internet Security (OEM version) |
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Operating System |
Support for Microsoft/ Windows/ Vista/XP |
{mospagebreak title=Features}
Features:
The EP45T is one feature packed board. I was overwhelmed by the amount of options you get when you pick this board up.
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Starting with the most prominent, GIGABYTE’s new Advanced Dynamic Energy Saver (from this point forward I will call it ADES. This feature is one that has gotten some press time with an outright argument erupting between GIGABYTE and Asus. I have no intention of trying to determine who has the better offering at this time. I can say that ADES is pretty impressive. GIGABYTE claims that this hardware based feature is able to dynamically adjust the power draw by individual phases ranging from 1 to 6 as needed for performance. In a recent review of the GPU performance and power efficiency I used a workstation board with an Intel QX9770 Quad Core CPU. This board idled at 196 Watts with the GIGABYTE 4850. The EP45T-DS3R idled at 141 Watts with the same card. Under gaming load I saw a difference of 205 Watts for the EP45T-DS3R Vs 313 Watts. This is not bad at all and can add up to some savings when the power bill hits. I had this feature enabled for all testing, including overclocking and did not have any performance issues with it.
Now to gain this benefit you do have to have a 45nm CPU that has PSI enabled.
The next on the list is the Ultra Secure feature. This is actually an added in TPM module from Infineon that provides data encryption of up to 2048 bits. Although turning this feature on is a mixed bag, if you set it to load at startup it will ask you for your data storage password regardless of whether or not you tell it to remember the password. The offending window sits on top of other windows (even task manager) and will not close unless you put in the proper password. For my testing I had this enabled and it did not hinder performance at all. The EP45T-DS3R supports Crossfire, however it does so at a slight disadvantage.
The P45 does not have enough PCI-e lanes for two full x16 slots. This means that Crossfire runs at x8 on the secondary card.
Other features include, Dual Gigabit Lan (with teaming) Overvoltage protection, Ferrite Core chokes, all solid capacitors, Low RDS(on) MOSFET Design, Dolby home theatre certification, e-SATA ports, and much more.
{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
The EP45T-DS3R is a fairly well laid out board. There is plenty of room around the CPU. The PCI-e slots are spaced to accommodate dual slot GPU coolers. But there are some downsides. GIGABYTE, in an effort to show off their ADES and 6 Phase power stepping placed LEDs at the top of the board to indicate how many Phases are operational. I like this feature but found that once the board was mounted it was difficult to see. It would have been nice to have this lower on the board or to have provided a break-out box that could show this information in real-time. The PCI-e x1 slots are not located very well. If you have a dual slot GPU cooler you end up being limited to one PCI-e x1 slot. The same thing happens if you are running Crossfire with dual slot coolers, but this also removes one PCI slot as well.
PATA and SATA ports are well placed as are all of the extra ports (USB,FireWire, etc)
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One thing to note GIGABYTE chose to swap the front panel headers with the SATA ports to allow more clearance for longer GPUs.
This might not be a problem for most but can cause a hassle in certain cases. Maybe in addition to the breakout box for the ADES system they need to add a front panel extender, Honestly the way the headers are in a "slot" it looks like this might have been a consideration during design but never made it to market.
{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
The BIOS on the EP45T-DS3R is not quite there yet. Although there are many options for Voltage control, some of the options that are most used by enthusiasts (Clock skew and Performance Level) were missing. Command Rate was there but was not completely easy to use as you had to set it per channel and per bank. It took me a little while to figure out where everything was in the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker as GIGABYTE has renamed almost everything. I do think that with a little work this board could give even DFI a run for its money with adjustments and tweaks.
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{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}
OverClocking:
Wow, what a difference a new Chipset makes. For a while now people have been stating that Quad Core CPUs have an FSB wall at 470-475 MHz. They also say that this is something that cannot be gotten around. I have held out that limitations like this one are related to the Chipset, they tend to revolve around ability of the chipset to handle the amount of Data from all four cores at high FSBs. Well, it looks like I was in the right ballpark. The QX9770 I have is capable of running at 4.4 GHz without too much effort and usually runs at no higher than 475MHz in fact anything over 465MHz starts to have major issues and this CPU has never posted on any board over 475MHz. Well the P45 on the Gigabyte posts at 500MHz and even gets to the Login screen. I was unable to login (I received a BSOD every time) but I believe that with the right tweaks and perhaps different RAM I would be able to get this running stable at 500MHz. I was finally able to achieve a stable overclock of 480MHzx8 or 3.84GHz. All of this was done with the stock F1 BIOS I have not even tested out what the newer BIOSes might offer overclocking. The CPU voltage was 1.4875v, RAM was set to run at a 3.33 divider (approximately 1600MHz) with a vDIMM of 1.98. DDR timings were set to 7-7-7-18. I have included the test scores achieved with this overclock in the performance section.
The CPUz validation for this OC can be found here.
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{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}
Performance:
Test system:
Intel QX9770
GIGABYTE EP45T-DS3R
GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB (2x for Crossfire Testing)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2GX DDR3-1625MHz
Western Digital 150GB RaptorX HDD
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooling kit
PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU
HiSpeed PC techstation
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate w/SP1
Subsystem Performance:
Memory:
DDR3 has been often lambasted for offering nothing in terms of performance for the much higher cost.
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The P45 is no exception, I was not impressed with the potential bandwidth the DDR3 1600 showed on this board. I would have thought I would see an improvement given the newer chipset. This was not the case.
Drive performance:
The EP45T-DS3R features a newer ICH10R controller for SATA and RAID. While this technically should be able to give us better SATA performance, sadly this was not the case. The older ICH9R on the X48 boards performs much faster than the new ICH10R.
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Audio
The Audio on the EP45T-DS3R is really well done for an onboard CODEC. Powered by the Realtek ALC889A you get 7.1 surround Dolby Home Theatre support, Optical and Coaxial SPDiF support and no noticeable performance impact.
Application Performance
FutureMark:
For the numbers crowd, I have your fix of PCMark and 3DMark Vantage here.
PCMark:
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PCMV-x86 Stock |
PCMV-x64 Stock |
PCMV-x86 480×8 OC |
PCMV-x64 480×8 OC |
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3DMark:
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3DMV-Stock |
3DMV-Crossfire |
3DMV-480×8 OC |
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Nice scores all the way around. I did not run Crossfire while overclocked but may return to it once I have played with the new F3H BIOS.
Photoshop CS3:
Using Driver Heaven’s Photoshop test I wanted to see how well the EP45T would do at photo manipulation.
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While the EP45T-DS3R does very well it still cannot compete with the X48 in Photoshop.
LightWave x64 9.3:
LightWave is another of my application tests and does do quite well in showing off the rendering performance potential of a system.
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Stock |
480×8 OC |
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4:42 |
4:05 |
Time in Minutes and Seconds (lower is Better)
The EP45T does quite well at rendering with single frame rending times below 5 minutes.
HyperPi:
Ah, there is nothing like Pi, and Pi out to 32 million decimal places will just bring a warm feeling to your heart.
Well not really, but it is a great way to test system performance between the CPU, memory and HDDs.
It is also good for testing stability of these three components.
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Stock |
480×8 OC |
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The EP45T-DS3R shows good times for stock speeds. But I am very impressed by the overclocked times, the 17% OC managed a time reduction of roughly 4 minutes.
Cinebench R10:
Although Cinebench R10 is a synthetic test it is commonly used to gauge single and multi-core performance and multi core efficiency.
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Stock |
480×8 OC |
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The scores here are what we would expect from a QX9770. Something interesting is the 1300+ point increase in the OpenGL score while the system as overclocked
AutoGK Video Transcoding:
Video and Audio transcoding is a fact of modern computing. People just do this; it is not about pirating movies (in most cases) but preserving an investment. I like using AutoGK as it is more efficient (using multiple cores) and has everything I need in one nice package. For testing I use a 2-1/2 hour DVD of personal footage and convert to Xvid at 100% quality. The DVD was authored using DVD Studio Pro HD.
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Stock |
480×8 OC |
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43:22 |
39:35 |
Times here suffered due to the poor memory bandwidth and slower HDD performance but are still on par with what they should be.
{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Gaming Performance:
Our gaming performance is always measured during real game play. We run through each level three times to make sure we have a reproducible range. Frame Rates and Screen shots are captured using FRAPS 2.9.4. Game settings are listed with each game.
Bioshock:
Powered by the UT3 engine and featuring support for DX10 textures semi-positional sound (not to mentions some good global sound effects.) and decent AI, Bioshock is a good game to gauge system performance.
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Call of Duty Modern Warfare:
A great addition to the Call of Duty series , Modern Warfare is just that, you are placed in modern low-level conflicts around the world. Graphics are well done with a considerable amount of particle effect AI is better than average “bar fight” style, in all a good test of your system.
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Assassin’s Creed – DX10
Another DX10 game Assassin’s Creed is a very demanding game on a system. If you leave it unpacthed it will run better on the higher end ATi products due to DX 10.1 support. But no matter the level of patch, the one thing that AC has in all forms is too many cut scenes.
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The EP45T shows good performance and multi-GPU scaling, but shows little gain from overclocking. The sound quality in each game was good whether I used analog or digital out.
{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
the GIGABYTE EP45T-DS3R runs about $175 this is a good value when you consider the performance and overclockability the EP45T shows. Considering the cost of a good X48 board if you are looking to upgrade from an older board this price might change your purchasing decision.
GIGABYTE’s warranty is the industry standard three year on the EP45T-DS3R. It is important to note that this warranty is based off of the date of manufacture and not the date of purchase. RMA and additional information (for the US) can be found here.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I was very impressed with the EP45T-DS3R. I have always been leery of power saving features as most just sap performance from your system in the name of saving you power, heat, and noise whatever. This did not seem to be the case with the ADES system on the EP45T-DS3R. Even while overclocked the system ran well and did not seem to hinder my overclock at all. Performance was good although somewhat behind the X48. The extra TPM feature was nice but I could see if becoming a pain with continually usage. I can certainly recommend the EP45T-DS3R to anyone looking for a good quality, good performing, stable, DDR3 based board. For the price it is hard to beat.