With the P45 possibly being the last of the Intel Socket 775 chipset, many might be wondering if this Intel is selling them short. There are so many Core 2 Duos and Core 2 Quads on the market that it seems that Intel might be selling consumers short.
Well I can tell you that over the last three P45 based boards I have worked with the P45 is a great chipset to exit with. GIGABYTE has shown us with the EP45T-DS3R that they know how to put together a DDR3 P45 and that board not only performed well at stock but clocked quite nicely, being the first board to get us close to 500MHz FBS on a quad. Now we have another P45 offering this time a DDR2 flavored board. Dubbed the GA-EP45 Extreme with advanced cooling for the Northbridge and 12 phase power, will this board be the first to let us actually run at the coveted 500MHz FSB without phase change cooling? The answer is just a few clicks away.
Product: GIGABYTE GA EP45 Extreme
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: September 5th 2008
Product cost: $249.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
Wow, I have not seen a box this big since the early days of the ECS Extreme line. The box that the EP45 Extreme comes in is simply huge. But I suppose it needs to be as there are some interesting and nice little gadgets in the box. The outside of the EP45 Extreme’s box is the usual portable advertisement for the product with graphs and imagery to catch your eye and show off the EP45 Extreme’s features.
Opening the front flap you do get a full shot of the board and a glimpse of the Hybrid Silent-Pipe cooling system for the Northbridge.
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Opening the box you find the rest of the loot pretty standard for a GIGABYTE board. There is the usual e-SATA bracket, cables, manual… But here is something a little different. GIGABYTE is including a hardware installation guide in their boxes now. It is a black and white manual with images and tips on how to assemble your system. It contains information on everything from mounting the board to installing RAM.
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{mospagebreak title=Features}
Features:
Ah features, if you have ever bought a car you know that everything seems to be a “feature” these days. The same is true of hardware for your computer. But, if you can read between the lines and interpret the hype you will often find some very nice and worthy features in just about any product.
The EP45 Extreme has its share of hype but the real features are easier to pick out.
VRD 11.1 (Voltage Regulator Down Version 11.1)
This nice technology is Intel’s newest power specification and allows for CPU to mainboard communication of power needs. Combining this with GIGABYTE’s DES (Dynamic Energy Saver) the EP45 Extreme is able to drop down to a single phase. This (on paper at least) can provide for great power savings. With this new VRD specification GIGABYTE adds a note stating that VRD 10 CPUs are not compatible. They do provide a CPU compatibility listing that I would recommend checking out before grabbing this board.
GIGABYTE 6 (12?) Gear:
This handy little feature is great for day to day, non-overclocked use. It is a software component that compliments the hardware side of the GIGABYTE power management solution. Although called 6-Gear, on the EP45 Extreme it can shift between the 12 phases available. I did have a few issues with this on the EP45 Extreme though. Twice during testing the board attempted to go into sleep mode while running a test. Both times it was Video Transcoding. From what I can gather, during Demuxing and indexing of my DVD source, the system saw the CPU in an idle state and tried to power down, this caused a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and the system rebooted. I also had an issue where the BIOS became corrupted when accidentally entering the sleep state while overclocked. The EP45 Extreme automatically restored an older but complete version of the BIOS that enabled me to continue working after re-flashing to the F7 BIOS.
I would be leery of using this on the EP45 Extreme after experiencing these issues.
12 Phase Power:
Here we see another real feature, with full 12 phase power for the system but in addition to the 12 phases for the CPU we find a nice touch added in; two additional phases for both the Northbridge and for memory. This should help with power efficiency and stability to both of these components especially during overclocking.
Hybrid Silent-Pipe Northbridge cooling:
Another of the solid features of the EP45 Extreme is the Hybrid Silent-Pipe cooling for the Northbridge.
Although not as hot as the X48, the P45 is temperature sensitive and needs to be keep cool for best performance (just like every other chipset). While most of your high end boards feature a heat-pipe cooling system for the chipset and power regulators GIGABYTE went a step further, by giving you the option to add water into the mix as well as the option to place an enormous additional heat pipe to help pull some of the heat that P45 generates during normal and overclocked use away.
I know you are thinking this is a great idea, and in truth it is… but the execution is a little flawed.
As you can see in the images below the additional heat-pipe sits right behind the primary GPU and unfortunately absorbs quite a bit of its radiated heat. This was especially evident when running the very hot HD4850 I used for testing. This is not to say it is useless, but that its performance can be hindered by your choice of GPU. The inclusion of a built in water block for the Northbridge is still a nice touch and should work very well for keeping this board cool. I was not able to test this as my water cooling system (Corsair Nautilus 500) is setup for CPU only.
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There are other features such as pretty LEDs to show the number of phases used, a diagnostic LED setup, onboard Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons, and Dual Gigabit LAN with Teaming; but they are really just icing on top of an already tasty cake.
| Processor |
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| Front Side Bus |
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| Chipset |
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| Memory |
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| Audio |
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| LAN |
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| Expansion Slots |
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| Storage Interface | South Bridge:
iTE IT8213 chip:
iTE IT8720 chip:
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| IEEE 1394a |
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| USB |
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| Internal I/O Connectors |
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| Rear Panel I/O |
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| I/O |
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| H/W Monitoring |
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| BIOS |
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| Unique Features |
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| Bundle Software |
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| Operating System |
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| Form Factor |
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| Note |
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| Remark |
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{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
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At first glance the EP45 Extreme looks like a well laid out board, but only at first glance. After your second look some pretty obvious flaws will hit you.
The first flaw is the placement of the top PCI and PCI-e x1 slot.
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These slots should simply not be here, there are no use for them and they only compound the heat pocket I mentioned above if you choose to use the Hybrid Silent-Pipe, and considering that is a major feature there is no real reason to clutter up the board with a slot that will get no use. The PCI-e x1 slot cannot be used at all with Hybrid Silent-Pipe and is a complete waste where it is located. I am not sure what the GIGABYTE engineers were thinking but they really messed this one up. Speaking of the Hybrid Silent-Pipe, its location is also a minor issue. By placing the Hybrid Silent-Pipe where they did GIGBYTE created a hot spot above your GPU. The copper fins on the Hybrid Silent-Pipe are going to absorb heat from the Northbridge and the GPU, this area gets very little airflow in most PC cases and can affect GPU performance as well as your ability to keep your GPU cool if overclocked.
Next on our list are the SATA ports. They will be covered by most high end GPUs. Yes, two of these are tilted 90 degrees but the rest are regular orientation and while these are fine if you are using a small or single height card, any of the double height GPUs will cover up the remaining four SATA ports and render them almost unusable, even 90 degree cables have a rough time here and if used still removes two of the four slots.
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Item number three of layout blunders is the location of the power and reset switches. GIGABYTE chose to put these above the PATA port. This was a terrible decision as the PATA cable (even a rounded one) interferes with their use. This would be bad enough but if you throw in a 2nd card for Crossfire you lose the ability to reach the reset button and the power button is now hard to reach; and this is with a single height card! If you throw in a double height card like the 4870 you lose the PATA port too!
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Last on our list is the additional Firewire and USB headers, they are in a pretty good spot until you try to use CrossfireX. Any card put in the third PCI-e slot makes these headers worthless, and again prevent using the PATA port.
In all I have to say the layout of the EP45 Extreme is not good at all, to me it seems that things were placed haphazardly on the board with no thought to how they would work in practice.
If the EP45 Extreme cannot pull off some stunning overclocks or stock performance it looks things do not look good.
{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
The first thing I did when testing the EP45 Extreme was to flash the BIOS to the F7 version. I did not go through the stock or shipping BIOS as I had problems with it from the very beginning. The F7 BIOS is pretty well laid out. It follows the typical award BIOS format. But for most people the place you will want to visit often is the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) here is where you will find all of the CPU, RAM, Voltage, GPU tweaks you could want. The big problem here (like on the EP45T DS3R) is that GIGBYTE has different names for them than what you might be used to. For example, FSB Termination is called CPU Termination. Southbridge voltage is called ICH I/O and ICH Core. Northbridge is similarly named MCH. Now these are not things that you won’t be able to figure out but they are different.
One item of interest that I find to be refreshing is the new Green LAN. This handy feature allows the board to automatically power down a LAN port if there is no cable plugged in. Now this might not seem like much but it saves you time if you want to run teaming and then change your mind. To shut off the second LAN all you have to do is unplug the cable, no need to reboot or go into the BIOS.
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{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}
Overclocking:
Well color me impressed, despite the awful layout the EP45 Extreme is able to clock pretty well.
With the EP45T-DS3R I was able to reach an FSB of 490 with a QX9770 and even post much higher but I had no stability. With an Asus P5Q Deluxe I have been able to get into Windows Vista and even get a CPUz shot but anything else crashes the system at once. Now… on the EP45 Extreme, I have finally been able to get to 500MHz FSB and run there stably, this is also with my Mushkin XPS-8500 running at DDR2-1200 (6-7-7-18) you will notice from the screen shot below that the Performance Level on the RAM is 14; unfortunately there is no place to set that in the BIOS. I was able to get it as low as 9 using Memset but that is not the recommended way to set timings. The inability to set the PL and other advanced timings in the BIOS is an issue considering this board is marketed directly at overclockers, where every setting matters.
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The actual test results will be included in the performance section.
{mospagebreak title=Power Usage}
Power Usage:
The EP45 Extreme shows that it can be very efficient when running at stock. But since this is an extreme board and designed with overclocking in mind I have a feeling that most of you will be looking at the Overclocked numbers here where the EP45 Extreme seems to guzzle the watts down.
Bear in mind that this is power draw that I experienced with the test setup I was using. Your results may vary. All “from the wall” power testing was done using a P3 Kill A Watt.
| Power -stock | Watts | |
| Idle | 151 | |
| Load | Low | High |
| Gaming | 226 | 251 |
| Render | 190 | 233 |
| HyperPi | 162 | 230 |
| Power – OC | Watts | |
| Idle | 224 | |
| Load | Low | High |
| Gaming | 259 | 315 |
| Render | 294 | 335 |
| HyperPi | 307 | 331 |
| Power – Crossfire | Watts | |
| Idle | 201 | |
| Load | Low | High |
| Gaming | 245 | 299 |
| Render | 202 | 240 |
| HyperPi | 206 | 236 |
{mospagebreak title=Performance I}
Performance:
The Test System:
Intel QX9770 Core 2 Extreme CPU 3.2 GHz (400×8)
GIGABYTE GA-EP45 Extreme Mainboard
Mushkin XP2-8500 4GB Kit (2x2GB DRR2 1066)
GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB (2x for Crossfire testing)
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB HDD
Plextor BluRay Drive
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Corsair Nautilus 500
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Subsystems:
Memory Bandwidth Potential:
I was rather disappointed by the memory performance the EP45 Extreme showed at stock speed.
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The inability to set the Performance Level for the RAM in the BIOS is showing here.
Hard Drive Performance:
Drive performance was on par with other P45 base boards. Some aspects were slightly faster and others slightly slower.
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Audio:
Most boards these days have excellent onboard sound CODECs and provide very full and clean sound.
The EP45 Extreme is no exception. Again given the space this board is marketed to the sound Codec might be turned off to get that bit of extra stability at high clocks for benching.
Applications:
PCMark Vantage
Although PCMark Vantage is a completely synthetic test is can be used to identify weak areas in a system and also to provide an “at a glance” overview of performance. We include it for that reason and to give the “Numbers Gang” something to look at:
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PCMark Vantage Stock |
PCMark Vantage 500×8 OC |
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x86 |
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x64 |
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The EP45 Extreme shows some nice numbers here at stock, but I was not impressed with the scores while over clocked.
Cinebench R10:
Cinebench is another synthetic that is designed to give a good estimation or your systems rendering performance.
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Cinebench R10 x64 Stock |
Cinebench R10 x64 500×8 OC |
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Very good numbers again from the EP45 Extreme even showing better performance at stock than the P5Q Deluxe, where we really see the jump is at 500MHz FSB breaking the 17.5k mark with ease.
HyperPi 0.99b
We, at Planetx64, use HyperPi as a test of system stability as well as CPU to Memory to HDD performance.
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HyperPi 0.99b 32M Stock |
HyperPi 0.99b 32M 500×8 OC |
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The performance we see at stock speeds is reflective of the low bandwidth we achieved in our memory testing. Overclocked to 4.0GHz (500MHz x8) shows a very healthy boost, but is still slow for the OC.
AutoGK 2.45
AutoGK 2.45 is our transcoder of choice; it uses a version of VirtualDub and combines all of the audio and video CODECs needed into easy to use package.
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AutoGK 2.45 Stock |
AutoGK 2.45 500×8 OC |
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The PE45 Extreme fails to impress, although it does get good times comparatively it lacks the memory and HDD performance to outpace other P45 boards
Photoshop CS3
Photoshop is pretty much the Defacto standard for image manipulation, as such it can be used as an overall test for image manipulation performance. For testing I sed DriverHeaven.net’s Photoshop CS2 test script and image.
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Not bad numbers, but I would have thought the overclocked performance would be better. Again memory heavy applications show poor performance on this board.
Lightwave 9.3 x64:
Lightwave, like Photoshop, is one of the defacto standard applications for 3Damination and content creation. I like using it as it has been developed for 64 bit use and is eaay to obtain for others to run the same tests (Newtek has a fully featured trail versions available). For my tests I use the Moonbase scene available on the Lightwave 8.0 content CD (Frame 32). settings can be seen in the render completion images below.
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Lightwave 9.3 x64 Stock |
Lightwave 9.3 x64 500×8 OC |
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Again not bad numbers but still the OC should have shown much better results.
{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Gaming:
3DMark Vantage
Again for the Number Crowd we provide some 3DMark Vantage goodness.
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3DMark Vantage Stock |
3DMark Vantage 500×8 OC |
3DMark Vantage Crossfire |
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It looks like the GIGABYTE EP45 Extreme can handle itself where heavy graphics are concerned. Overclocking shows a healthy GPU score increase.
Bioshock
Bioshock is a great game to play (although the end is a bit linear and corny) and great to test systems with. For testing I ran the “Welcome to Rapture” level from after you acquire the Electro Bolt Plasmid until you reach Medical. Settings are shown below, for some reason Vertical Sync kept re-enabling whenever I went into the image settings page but, it was off for all testing.
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The GIGABYTE EP45 Extreme when combined with the 4850 is a very quick and nice gaming board as we see from the frame rates I was able to get out of Bioshock.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare
Call of Duty Modern Warfare is a DX9 game but has some impressive graphics and a massive AI (that I have dubbed Bar Fight AI) COD Modern Warfare is also a very fun and immersive game to play. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” Level from your drop onto the ship to the opening of the container.
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The GIGABYTE EP45 Extreme shows itself to be a very capable gaming platform.
Assassin’s Creed DX10
One of two full DX10 (10.1?) games that we use for testing Assassin’s Creed is a third person game that has good graphics and fairly decent AI. My Testing level consisted of the beginning level until you are sent outside of the city on your first new mission.
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Again the EP45 Extreme makes light work of Assassin’s Creed in DX10 mode
Lost Planet Extreme Conditions DX10
Although Lost Planet is an older game; it is still very rough on a system. It was designed to take advantage of quad core CPUs and dual GPUs and even when you have those in your system the sheer amount of rendering (from fogs to shadows to motion blurs) especially using DX10 is staggering you can almost hear your system whimpering. For testing I ran the beginning level until I reached the second warehouse.
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The EP45 Extreme even does a good job with Lost Planet in DX10 mode with frame rates just below our 32 FPS mark with a single card and very playable rates in Crossfire mode.
{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The GIGABYTE GA-EP45 Extreme is available on line for about $250 ($249.99 from newegg.com). This price puts it between the Asus Maximus II at $269 and the P5Q Deluxe at 199.99. When you put everything together I am not sure if this is a good price. True you can get some good clocks out of the EP45 Extreme, but there are so many issues with board layout and memory performance (missing settings) I just do not feel comfortable saying it is a good value.
Warranty on the EP45 Extreme is the standard 3 year warranty that GIGABYTE offers on all of its mainboards.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The GIGABYTE EP45 Extreme has been a very mixed bag for me. While the packaging suggests something extraordinary what I found inside was only above average. Memory and HDD performance were not what they should be for a P45, and this was shown more than once by poor results from memory or HDD intensive applications. It is true that graphical and CPU intensive tests showed better results but they are only part of a system. Overclocking was also good and I was able to achieve my highest FSB yet on a P45 board with my old QX9770. But once at the higher speed I still saw poor memory performance. Would I spend the $250 for this board? I am not sure to be perfectly honest.
Acknowldgements:
I would like to thank Angela Lan at GIGABYTE for all of her help in putting together this evaluation.