Asus, as we have mentioned before, is one monster of a company, they are pretty much into everything now and have still managed to produce some high quality hardware (some of their software could use some work though.) So, With the launch of the i7 it is no surprise that Asus is one of the first out of the gate with an X58 based mainboard.  Dubbed the P6T Deluxe, this board sports both Crossfire and SLI support, native DDR3 1333MHz for all three of the i7s Intel is releasing and a host of other very nice features. How does it stand up to the Intel reference board? Well take a look below to find out.

*** New Information on Pricing:
Asus has stated there will be two versions of the P6T Deluxe, one with the OC Palm MSRP $329 and one without MSRP $299.***

Product: Asus P6T Deluxe  OC Palm Edition
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: October 30th 2008
Product cost: $309
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The P6T Deluxe arrived in a rather large box, with all of the usual marketing hype on just about every available surface. That is not to say that everything on the box is useless, there are some very good selling points; such as the use of 5000 hour VRMs and all solid capacitors (although most high end board use these now anyway), Built in SAS RAID controller (RIAD 0 and 1), as well as a few other unique features. But as with most hardware purchases it is not the box or the marketing we are buying but the goodies inside.
The P6T ships with a decent range of parts including two SAS cables, for the onboard SAS controller, the OC Palm (I will cover this below), an SLI connector, a fan to use on the heat-pipe system if you are cooling the CPU with water and the usual allotment of SATA and PATA cables.

{mospagebreak title=OC Palm}
OC Palm:
This is probably one of the most interesting accessories that Asus has put in with the P6T Deluxe. The OC Palm device is small (about the size of a point and shoot digital camera), with an LCD display and several buttons (enhancing the impression of it being a camera), It connects to your system via a USB port and has a few uses. Its primary purpose is to give you a live, real-time overclocking and monitoring tool for your system but, it can also display a number of Yahoo widgets (you can move back and forth between them). For overclocking support you have a couple of options, you can use the TurboV plug-in or simply adjust the clock speed up or down in 1MHz intervals by pressing one of the two top buttons.
The buttons can be swapped and even changed to launch applications. I found this device to be an excellent method for monitoring the system during applications that ran in Full Screen (I.E. gaming)
The Widget side is a nice feature but not one that I would use personally, there are not many things that I want to watch that much, system temps, CPU and memory usage are more what I would want from this device. However after playing around with the Yahoo widgets I found them to be a little on the bland side for this type of monitoring.

{mospagebreak title=Features and Specifications}
Features and Specifications:
The P6T comes with a pretty nice feature set, the highlights are listed below:
16+2 Phase power, as with many of the P45 series the P6T will have full 16 phase power,  but Asus has added in an additional two phases just for the OPI/Memory controller inside the CPU. This should allow for cleaner and more efficient power distribution to the CPU. 

Onboard SAS controller:
Powered by a Marvell 88SE6320 you can bring enterprise class  storage and performance to your desktop in RAID 0 or 1 configurations.
EPU 6 Engine:
This is another handy feature, in my testing of the i7 I found that while the CPU was energy efficient, the system as a whole was not. With the Asus Energy Processing Unit you can dynamically adjust power on the board and peripherals to get the best power savings and performance out of your new i7 system.

TurboV:
TurboV is the name of the overclocking utility for the i7 platform, just as AI Suite was for the past platforms.   It allows for very specific adjustments to the system (down to .02 for voltage) so that you can get the most performance out of your system. TurboV can be run from inside Windows and changes the BIOS settings in real time without the need for constant rebooting. The OC Palm can also work through the TurboV API and gives you an added level of control.

OC Palm:
I mentioned the OC Palm under accessories but it is another feature and gives you “front end” access to the TurboV functions.

Crossfire X and SLI support:
Here is something we have all been waiting for, a single board that allows for both Crossfire and SLI support. The P6T Deluxe supports them both giving you the freedom to choose the GPU flavor you like best.

Express Gate:
Express Gate is a small Linux distro stored away on a small SSD. It allows for quick and easy access to the internet, e-mail skype, without the need for any other OS. You could unpack this mainboard plug in your CPU, memory, GPU and PSU. Turn the P6T on and be on the internet within a few seconds.  You do not even need a hard drive, of course this would be a complete waste of this board but it is a nice feature even if it is not used much.

Tri-Channel DDR3 support for up to 24GB:
On the Intel reference board (the DX58SO) there were still the traditional 4 ram slots this means that for tri channel you are left with an odd man out. That fourth stick of memory can add capacity but does nothing for performance. Asus decided to take things a little farther. They threw six DDR3 slots on the board giving you support for up to 24GB of triple channel goodness. Asus has also added in Native support for DDR3 -1333 for the i7-965, 945 and 920, giving you an edge over the Intel reference board even at stock settings.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
The layout of most modern boards leave a lot to be desired, but with increasing RAM demands, the need for larger cooling products, dual and tri GPU configurations it is hard to sandwich everything in.
Asus has done a pretty good job in getting the P6T as clean as possible. As you can see from the images below they have allowed for longer GPUs by tilting the majority of the SATA ports (you will still lose two in an SLI or Crossfire setup). Asus have also done something that I praise them for; they have kept the PATA port. Intel for some reason has removed this from the majority of their new boards, meaning you have to use a SATA DVD-RW etc on your system. Granted SATA drives are not as expensive as they were they are still problematic in most systems (many Transcoding apps won’t work with them).  They have widened the gap between the RAM slots and the Primary GPU slot, moved the CMOS battery to the top of the board and rotated it by 90 degrees also. One issue I did encounter though was when I installed a fan on the Northbridge heatsink. Since I was using the ThermalRight 120 Xtreme, my Northbridge fan ended up being too tall and hit the side of the ThermalRight120. The new retaining clips on the PCI-e slots are easier to reach from either side and do not require much force to unlatch.
In all the P6T is a very nice board to work with and well laid out.

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
As with the DX58SO, the Asus P6T is going to be a whole new ballgame once you are in the BIOS.
Although the basic Asus BIOS layout is the same, what you find inside is going to take a little while to get used to.

You will find new terms like BCLK, QPI, UCore, and a few others.
However you will still find 99% of your tweaks and overclocking settings in the AI Tweaker page.
For some good information about what each one of these is and how they affect performance take a look here and grab the i7 OC calculator here.

{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}
Overclocking:
My overclocking here is not what I would call spectacular, it is not bad for a first run on a new platform.
I was able to bump the i7 965 up to 3.9GHz with very little effort. Over that became a headache, as I was able to get into windows at up to 4.2 but it would crash as soon as I opened anything (including the start menu).  At 4.1 and 4.0 I could run CPUz but not much else. For non BIOS overclocking you can startup TurboV and get the same results from inside windows or using the OC Palm device.

Final quick OC numbers were:

These are the settings that allowed me to run through all of my tests without failure.

{mospagebreak title=Performance – Subsystems}
Performance – Subsystems:
For my testing I used the following system:
Intel Core i7 Extreme 965 (3.2 GHz)
Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition (BIOS 0806)
QIMONDA 3 x 1GB DDR3 1067
Zotac GTX 280 AMP! Edition 1GB (two for SLI Testing)
Seagate Cheetah 147 GB 15k RPM SAS HDD
Mushkin 1KW PSU
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate (w/SP1)
nVidia 180.43 drivers

Memory:
With three channels of memory to play with the i7 is head and shoulders above all of the other systems in terms of memory bandwidth and the P6T Deluxe shows us even better results.

Stock 133×24 (3.2GHz)	OC 145×27 (3.9GHz)

Drive Performance:
With support for SAS drives I thought I would see what type of boost you would get from running one.

As you can see the performance gain over standard SATAII is almost worth the extra price.

Audio:
Audio from the P6T was very well done, featuring an ADI AD2000B 8 Channel sound CODEC I was able to get very full sound without any stuttering or performance issues.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Applications}
Performance – Applications:
PCMark Vantage:
One of standard tests for the numbers crowd. We run this as more of a baseline than a full on performance test.

What a difference an SSD makes! With an SSD in the lead we saw numbers in the 11k range however running an SAS drive those drop down into the 6k range at stock speeds losing almost 50% of the score we saw with the Intel X25 SSD. Overclocked scores pushed the P6T into the low 7k range.

LightWave 3D (9.3 x64):
LightWave 3D is one of the industry standards in 3D animation and works well as a real world application test.

The P6T Deluxe shows off the i7 EE 965 performance even better than the DX58SO did as it is able to shave the single frame render time down to 3:15 at stock speeds and under 3 minutes when overclocked to 3.9 GHz

Cinebench R10 x64:
On the opposite side from LightWave 3D is Maxon’s Cinebench. This test is a synthetic that measures your CPUs ability to render images and your GPUs ability to render OpenGL.

Again it looks like the P6T Deluxe is a faster board than the DX58SO beating the stock score by 148 points. Overclocking the P6T with the i7 965 gets us scores that outpace even the monster V8 system we used in our i7 Eval.

Photoshop:
Photoshop (as I am sure most of you know) is the industry standard for image manipulation and can be rough on a system with its high memory needs and CPU based filters (Until CS4 is released).  For testing I use the DriverHeaven.net Photoshop benchmark. This test runs a single image through multiple filters and times each run.

The P6T at stock has a hair (.5 seconds) faster overall than the DX58SO and traded off the individual filters. The times while overclocked were simply amazing.

AutoGK 2.45:
My Transcoding tests on the i7 showed that although the i7 had power to spare and that AutoGK 2.45 will make use of the extra threads and cores the real issue is memory and HDD. In the DX58SO with the Intel X25 SSD the i7 was able to encode a 2 and ½ hour movie in just over 34 minutes. On the P6T Deluxe with a 15k RPM SAS drive that time lengthened to 35 minutes. Overclocking showed good performance gains and was able to overcome the lack of the fast SSD with an encoding time of just over 32 minutes.

HyperPi 0.99b:
HyperPi, as I have mentioned many times before, is a great test of a systems CPU to RAM to HDD speed and stability.

On the DX58SO we saw times that were less than what we expected from the available memory and HDDs used. However on the P6T the times come back into line with what we would expect from the a 3.2GHz system running 8 concurrent 32MB runs of HyperPi.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Gaming}
Performance – Gaming:
For my gaming tests I wanted to run DX10 for as many games as possible, DX10 seems to have the biggest performance impact on a system (both CPU and GPU). All test were actual in-game performance with frame rates measured with FRAPS.
Categories were:
Stock CPU Single GPU
Stock CPU SLI
Overclocked CPU Single GPU
Overclocked CPU SLI

3DMark Vantage:
As with our inclusion of PCMark we use this test as a baseline for system performance and not a final test.

We get good results from the P6T in both Single and SLI modes. The addition of PhysX does artificially increase the CPU score but as this is only a base line test (and bragging rights) it is not an overly large concern.

FarCry2 (DX10):
FarCry 2 is n unusual addition to the FarCry saga, although ostensibly the follow on to FarCry it does not have the Crytek engine. It can still have hefty impact on your system at high resolutions. For testing I ran through the first few errands of the game. Settings are shown below.

The P6T with the Zotac GTX 280 puts up some good numbers in Single card mode, although we did see a slight loss in performance while overclocked. When you drop in a 2^nd Zotac GTX 280 fir SLI we see something phenomenal; FarCry2 at 1920×1200 in DX10 with all the eye-candy on running at a blistering 98 frames per second at stock CPU speed and just a hair under 100 FPS while overclocked.

Dead Space:
Dead Space is another new title and one that seems simply owned by nVidia. For testing I ran through Level One.

Although extremely fast the numbers here are boringly fast with frame rates over 160 FPS with a single card and nearing 300 with SLI.

Crysis Warhead DX10:
The Crysis twins are possibly the roughest games on a system that have come along in some time. Speculation for this has ranged from the large texture files to poor coding on Crytek’s part. You can make your own call on that. For testing I ran through the "Call Me Ishmael" level.

At 1920×1200 with everything set to “enthusiast” the single Zotac GTX 280 1GB AMP! Edition GPU was struggling to get me to 19 Frames Per Second. The same card with the i7 965 Overclocked to 3.9 GHz topped out at just over 20 FPS. But with the addition of a 2^nd GTX 280 we had very playable frame rates even with the game settings maxed out in DX10.

Crysis  (x64 DX10):
Crysis, even more so than Warhead, is hard on a system, our testing with a single Zotac GTX 280 1GB Amp!  was hurting under the strain of this game running at 1920×1200 all settings at “Very High” in DX10, x64 mode. But when I dropped in that 2^nd GTX 280 is was a whole different ball game; suddenly I had frame rates in excess of 40 and a game that looked stunning and was very playable. For testing I ran through the Contact Level.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky (DX10):
I am not really a big fan of the Stalker series, they remind me too much of Oblivion and is defined by long periods of boredom and walking punctuated by short exciting battles. The graphics are pretty well done although the textures and background tended to look over exposed and pixilated to me, like a picture enlarged too much. For testing I ran through the first few missions through reinforcing Clear Sky’s position in the swamp.

Performance wise Stalker puts a hurting on a system slowing a single GTX 280 down to just over 23 FPS at 1920×1200, DX10, and everything else maxed out.  Overclocking the i7 965 did manage to squeak out another 6 FPS but it was not until I dropped the 2^nd GTX 280 in that I had a smooth and playable game at high resolutions.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The Asus P6T Deluxe should hit the market with a $309 price tag but that should quickly fall as production is ramped up and i7 availability increases. Realistically this is not too far out of line with current board prices. Performance will certainly cover the $30-$40 difference and the ability to run both SLI and Crossfire makes the P6T a good buy in my opinion.

Warranty for the P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition will follow the standard 3 year warranty offered on all Asus boards.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The Core i7 is a revolutionary design from Intel, to make the most of it you will need a board that follows this lead. The Asus P6T Deluxe is one of those boards. Out of the box performance was excellent. I saw very few glitches during normal use and found even the SAS setup to be simple under Vista. Asus’ continued support for x64 shows up on the P6T also with x64 versions of all drivers and applications on the support DVD. The added bonus of 6 DIMM slots allowing for larger Tri-Channel memory setups is a great feature for the x64 crowd.
Looking at the added in features such as the OC Palm Asus gives a nice tool for the constant tinkerer, for those that always need to tweak this or adjust that you now have a device you can use to do this without rebooting into the BIOS or opening up an application. Although I did find the Yahoo widgets to be lacking it still does add some additional “fun” things you can throw onto the OC Palm.
Gaming under SLI was simply amazing on the P6T Deluxe. For the first time I saw very playable frame rates at high resolutions (maxed out) in Crysis and Crysis Warhead.  I had just about written those games off due to poor performance.
Overclocking the P6T was also simple, I had three choices for my overclocking, TurboV inside windows, the OC Palm (using TuboV) and the BIOS. All yielded good results and were easy to use once I had a good grasp on the new terms for the i7.
Asus has a history of making high quality first run products and it looks like the P6T Deluxe will be another one. If you are considering the i7 as your next upgrade I would make sure you have the P6T Deluxe OC Palm edition on your shopping list.

The P6T Deluxe OC Palm is awarded our Best on the Planet award for features and performance.

Discussion Link

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.

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.

{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.

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.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:

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.

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.

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 2^nd 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!

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.

{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.

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.

{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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Discussion Link

Another day another Asus product in my lab (or as one of my friends calls it Aladdin’s Cave). This time we have the P5Q Deluxe up on the grill, this DDR2 P45 based offering from Asus has the looks and specifications of a winner. But how well will it take the heat? Let’s turn up the gas and see if it cooks evenly on both sides.

Product: Asus P5Q Deluxe  
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: August 30th 2008
Product cost: $199.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Discussion Link:

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
I am glad to see that Asus is working on their packaging, lately the boxes that come out of Asus are much more subdued and less like gaudy. This is a good trend and (to me at least) lends a level of class to their products as gaudy packaging tends to give the impression of a cheap product.
The front of the box proclaims three of the major features of the P5Q and indeed these three are major features for Asus as a whole. Express Gate, 16 Phase Power and EPU 6 Engine; I will cover each of these features in detail later.  Opening the flap there are more features to be shown off. Flipping the box over, yep you guessed it, another group of features.

Opening up the box gives us a view of the usual jumble of cables, underneath all of this sits the prize.
After digging the P5Q Deluxe out of the box and removing the static bag, a thought struck me… when did it become ok for manufactures to put stickers all over our mainboards? We are subjected to their “adds” on the box but after we have bought the product do we really need to be reminded with stickers covering components on the boards? I hope that this trend goes away, as I think it is a waste of time and money. Well that little rant out of the way let’s take a look at the goodies and specifications you get when you pick up the P5Q Deluxe.

That is quite a list.

{mospagebreak title=Features}
Features:
If I were to list everything that Asus lists as a feature on the P5Q Deluxe this would be a very long article.
Instead I will cover the ones that offer the consumer and enthusiast the most or are the most interesting.
Express Gate:
This is an interesting feature and has great merit. I am not sure how much use it would be put to though. It is really nothing more than a stripped down version of Linux shoved into a small SSD. This OS has the ability to mount the OS drive and to access data (pictures and video only.) that is stored there.  Asus claims this is an “Instant Gateway to Fun”, but to be honest after playing around with it a few times the novelty wore off and I actually disabled it so that I did not see the screen each time I booted the system. I usually have a laptop on so I do not need a 5 Second boot and the OS was too limited to be of much use to me.  It cannot even be used as a built in diagnostic or recovery device. If your system crashes and you are unable to restore the OS you would only have access to your picture and video files for backup and recovery.  There is no CLI that can be readily access. Granted there are a couple of hacked versions out on the net but they should be approached with caution.

Drive Expert:
This is a nice feature that finally puts real hardware based RAID onto a consumer board, granted you are only getting RAID 0 and 1, but it is a start.  Powered by a Silicone Image SIL5723 users are able to choose between Easy Backup (RAID 1) and Super Speed (RAID 0). You can enable this feature either through the BIOS or using the Drive Expert utility. After tinkering with this I would recommend (as Does Asus) three drives for this; one for the OS and two for the Drive Expert Storage.  Drive Expert is also available inside the Express Gate OS.

Overclocking:
While not technically a feature, Asus does make their boards with tweaking and overclocking in mind. Only DFI puts more effort into designing their boards for the overclocker. With tools such as AI Booster, Fan Expert, AI Suite and Asus PC Probe II you are offered a wealth of resources right out of the box for your overclocking desires. But it is not just software gimmicks; Asus has fine tuned the BIOS to help you as well. By allowing for adjustment of FSB and PCI-e frequencies in 1MHz steps you get great control over your clocks. Voltages are stepped in .00625v increments for precise voltage control. There are also a larger number of steps for RAM, Northbridge, CPU PLL, and Hyper Transport (VTT CPU) than most other boards.  These, when rolled together, make overclocking on an Asus board a feature all its own.

16-Phase Power:
Doubling the old 8-Phase setups on older Asus mainboards, the new 16-Phase design offers increased power stability, lower heat, longer component life, lower power loss, and of course better overclocking.

To enhance this feature Asus is using high quality components such as Japanese conductive polymer capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and RDS (on) MOSFETs.

EPU-6 Engine:
EPU-6 Engine is a new variant on the EPU system that allows for real time voltage control over all parts of the system. Yep that is what it says on paper, but I found out that while this is a very good product you have to make sure that you have compatible products. For example, in my test system I used a 4850 from GIGABYTE. The EPU-6 would not control the voltage or even give me a reading on it, all the system said was that my GPU was not supported. I also had issues with Kingston RAM and I ended up using the Mushkin XP 8500 which worked without a problem. Other than the issue with the GPU I found the software side to be very easy to use and interesting to watch. The read out gives you information on current CPU voltage, overall power savings and an estimated amount of the reduction in CO2 emissions your system is putting out. I let the system run for 12 hours to see what my CO2 reduction would be and was surprised by the amount it claimed I was saving.  EPU-6 also controls the phases, increasing or reducing them as needed.

I tested the power consumption of the P5Q Deluxe at Stock Speeds and while Overclocked.

These numbers represent power draw from the wall as read by a P3 Kill A Watt.
At stock the P5Q does not do badly at all with the high-end hardware I have in it. Overclocking is another matter entirely, if you plan to max out the P5Q like I did you may want to turn everything else in the house off.

CrossfireX:
While the P5Q Deluxe does have three PCI-e x16 Physical slots they do not all run at x16. The Primary (Blue) slot is full x16, the first black slot maxes out at x8 and the final slot is only x4. Bear this in mind as the reduction in lanes will impact your Crossfire performance.

For more information on the P5Q Deluxe’s features take a look here

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}

Board Layout:
The P5Q Deluxe is a good looking board and does have a fairly decent layout, but there are some glaring issues with it as well.
One of the first to hit me is the placement of the SATA ports. For some reason Asus chose to put them in line with the PCI-e slot and right next to the memory slots. And while they did rotate 2 SATA ports by 90 degrees the remaining four are the regular orientation. SATA 6 is not usable if you have a larger GPU in the system SATA 1-3 are usable but not in the best place. SATA 4 and 5 are rotated and are the two that are the most likely to be used. Asus did rotate the PATA port which helps maintain a lower profile for the board. The next issue with the layout is again related to the primary PCI-e slot. It is in line with the lower ends of the RAM slots. Again this placement causes more problems making it very hard to get RAM in or out of these slots while a GPU is installed.
The last issue is the spacing between PCI-e slot 3 and 4. It is very tight here and being lower in the case might cause a pocket of hot air if you are running Crossfire. Amongst the good about the layout is the amount of space around the CPU, the heat pipe system does not interfere with third party coolers. I also am glad of the fact that Asus put both a PCI and a PCI-e x1 slot above the x16 PCI-e slot. This allows for more flexibility with third party add in cards. They have also tapered the NB cooler to allow clearance by cards used in these two slots.

{mospagebreak title=Bios}

BIOS:
Asus has always made a good BIOS, well for the most part they have always made a good BIOS. As with anything there are exceptions. The P5Q Deluxe has a well laid out BIOS with a good deal of tweaks available to the serious overclocker or for the person that just wants to max out stock performance. As I mentioned above adjustments are very granular which allow for a very good deal of control.

{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}

Overclocking:
As I mentioned above the P5Q deluxe seems to have been designed with the overclocker in mind. But it is not easy to use right out of the box. If you are used to working with the X48 or older chipsets you will find that what you have done in the past for good overclocks will probably not work. I found there are two ways to overclock the P5Q Deluxe. There is a quick and dirty way where all you need to do is set the vCore and vDIMM allowing the P5Q to set the voltages it thinks it should use for everything else and a more time consuming one where you need to set the vCore, vDIMM, CPU PLL, VTT and NB voltage very carefully to get the proper balance. This second choice is much harder as the P5Q Deluxe is very picky about voltage; too much or not enough and you have a board that wont post, but once you find the right spot you have a very clockable board. The first choice has some very large downfalls, if you allow the board to choose the other voltage settings you could end up pushing too much voltage into CPU PLL or the Northbridge. There have been reports of the P5Q pushing as much as 1.8v into the CPU! That is simply too high and more than outweighs the ease of this type of OC. In my testing I tried both methods I was able to get my QX9770 up to 490FSB with Memory at 1176MHz. For the quick and dirty method I had to push 1.5125 to get this stable and 1.5 to even boot into windows. Using the longer and more painstaking method I was able to reproduce this with as little as 1.425v (Windows and CPUz) but needed 1.45 to get the system stable. The maximum clock I was able to get a CPUz shot at was 500MHz FSB. I was also able to run HyperPi and Cinebench at 495 FSB but all other applications crashed or caused the system to reboot. Overclock settings and CPUz links below the performance numbers while at 490 FSB are in the performance section.

CPUz
490×8
495×8
500×8

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}

Performance:
Test system:

Intel QX9770 3.2GHz (Stepping C0)
Asus P5Q Deluxe (BIOS 0803)
4GB (2GBx2)Mushkin Ascent XP2 8500 DDR2 1066
GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB (2x for Crossfire testing)
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB 10k RPM HDD
Plextor PATA BluRay drive.
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Corsair Nautilus 500
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Catalyst 8.7 drivers

Subsystem Performance:

Drive Performance:
The drive performance on the P5Q was much better than I saw on the GIGABYTE EP45T-DSR3 and pretty much even with the performance of the Asus  P5E64-WS Evolution.

Memory:
Memory bandwidth at 1066 (Stock speed for the Mushkin XP 8500) was what you would expect and actually showed better bandwidth potential than DDR3 1600MHz.

Audio:
The Audio provided by the ADI AD2000B was crisp and clean for an onboard CODEC. I did not notice any performance issues during gaming or A/V playback.

Performance Applications:

PCMark Vantage:
PCMark Vantage is always a good test of basic system performance under  Vista  and we see the P5Q Deluxe giving us some good numbers for x86 and x64 performance, at stock and while Overclocked to 3.96GHz.

Cinebench R10:
Cinebench is from Maxon; the makers of Cinema4D and it not much more than a synthetic render test.

Again we see good numbers from the P5Q Deluxe.

LightWave 9.3 x64:
Our Lightwave testing is a little different than Cinebench. Instead of using a synthetic test we run a real-world render on a single frame (Frame 32) of Moonbase Scene found on the LightWave 8.0 content CDs.

The P5Q is fast but overclocked to 3.96GHz it renders our test scene in less than 4 minutes (almost a full minute faster than at stock).

HyperPi 0.99b:
One of our stock tests HyperPi runs an instance of SuperPi on each core concurrently.  This is a very good test of CPU to Memory to HDD stability and performance.

Again the P5Q shows some impressive numbers at stock and manages to shave a full two minutes of off the 32M time while overclocked.

Video Transcoding with AutoGK 2.45
Video Transcoding is something just about everyone does now, whether you are backing up your DVDs or trying to put your favorite movies on your iPod or iPhone. AutoGK is an all-in-one package that uses VirtualDub and allows for ease of use and installation. It is also a great test of system performance. I used a two and one half hour video that I shot and authored in DVD Studio HD. 

Photoshop CS3
Photoshop is pretty much the industry standard for image manipulation today. Even in the consumer segment there is Photoshop elements which is nothing more than a scaled down version of Photoshop. For testing I used DriverHeaven.net’s Photoshop test.
Below are the results

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}

Performance Gaming:

3DMark Vantage:
The only synthetic gaming test we use is 3DMark Vantage, this, like PCMark Vantage, is a good test to get a general feel for how well your system is able to handle gaming in Vista under DX9 and 10.

Bioshock:
Bioshock is a great game and also good for testing system performance in Vista.  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.with the only difference being vertical sync was disabled.

The P5Q had no problems with Bioshock although there was almost no performance difference while overclocked we did see good gains under Crossfire.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare:
Fast paced and nerve-wracking Call of Duty Modern Warfare is a great game and while not amazingly hard on a system can show weak spots in your gaming rig if you have any. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” Level from your drop onto the ship to the opening of the container.

Assassin’s Creed (DX10):
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed is a very interesting game, not only for its story line but for the way it handles combat. I like to run the original release with the DX10.1 features still there to get the full feel of the game. My Testing level consisted of the beginning level until you are sent outside of the city on your first new mission.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition (DX10)
Lost Planet was one of the first DX10 games and was also designed with Quad Core CPUs in mind. Unfortunately, it is also extremely hard on a system while running in DX10 mode even when using multiple GPUs. For testing I ran the beginning level until I reached the second warehouse.

Gaming:
When I started testing the P5Q I had mixed feelings about its gaming performance. While I had no doubt it would be very quick with a single card I was concerned that Crossfire would suffer from the lack of PCI-e lanes in the 2^nd PCI-e Slot. I was pleasantly surprised to find that was not the case. The P5Q in Crossfire mode with the HD4850 performed on par with the P5E64 WS Evolution. Now that is not to say that with a more powerful card, like the 4870 or either of the X2s, you would not see a difference just that for the most part if you are running a standard GPU you will not miss the other 8 lanes.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Price/Warranty:
The P5Q Deluxe can be had for the price of $199.99 (Newegg.com) . This is a very good price for the overclocking potential and general performance of the board and one that puts it about mid pack for other P45 based boards. Asus offers a three-year limited warranty on defects in manufacture.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I was very impressed with the P5Q Deluxe, although I am not so sure that the EPU6 is as revolutionary as Asus makes it out to be, the Full 16-Phase power does offer every bit of the stability and power they claim. I have been able to reach clocks that were simply out of range on other boards. I do wish they would change the way the Auto voltage settings work as these may cause problems for many users. Stock performance was also very quick and responsive. For the money you are not going to find a better DDR2 P45 board for your overclocking habit. Yet all was not beer and pizza as some of the features included like Express Gate and Drive Expert were pretty useless in my opinion; although I am sure that there are some that will make full use of them.
To wrap things up the P5Q Deluxe gets a high recommendation from us here. For the performance and overclocking potential it shows we are happy to award the P5Q Deluxe our Best on the Planet Award.

  Discussion Link:
if you like it digg it

Over the years we have had a couple of Intel Desktop boards in the lab, usually these are high-end parts that are designed for the enthusiast and are able to show off the performance of whatever Intel’s latest CPU is. Today we have something a little different. We have a G45 based Micro-ATX board that seems to us to only fit in the entry level or HTPC market. However, since we have been talking about AMD’s 780G chipset lately we thought it would be a good idea to give Intel its time in the spotlight. So today we present our findings on the Intel DG45ID G45 mainboard.

***Update 9/24/2008***
It seems I was incorrect in my statements about the UMA memory settings in the BIOS. According to Intel The DG45ID supports more than 256MB of memory with DVMT5.0 on series 4 chipsets. Also when running Vista the BIOS does not control the amount of memory allocated for Video use as it does with XP.

Product: Intel DG45ID    
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: August 15th 2008
Product cost: $114.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Intel
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Discussion Link

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
I cannot truly evaluate what the DG45ID’s packaging and the accessories that would ship with are like as the sample we received arrived in a plain brown cardboard box.
This is not to say that is what you will get if you pick one of these up, just that we did not receive a retail sample. Not to worry though, we can tell you what you should get when you buy a DG45ID.

{mospagebreak title=Specifications and Features}
Specifications and Features:
The DG45ID has the following specifications:
Form Factor Micro-ATX (9.60 inches by 9.60 inches [243.84 millimeters by 243.84 millimeters])

Processor Support for the following:
• Intel® Core™2 Quad processor in an LGA775 socket
• Intel® Core™2 Duo processor in an LGA775 socket
• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processor in an LGA775 socket
• Intel® Celeron® Dual-Core processor in an LGA775 socket
• Intel® Celeron® processor 400 Sequence in an LGA775 socket

Memory • Four 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM Dual Inline Memory Module (DIMM) sockets
• Support for DDR2 800 MHz or DDR2 667 MHz DIMMs
• Support for up to 8 GB of system memory using DDR2 800 MHz or DDR2 667 MHz DIMMs

Chipset Intel® G45 Express Chipset, consisting of:
• Intel® 82G45 Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH)
• Intel® 82801JR I/O Controller Hub (ICH10R)

Audio 8-channel (7.1) audio subsystem using the IDT* 92HD73E high definition audio codec and Dolby* Home Theater certification

Video Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD (Intel® GMA X4500HD) onboard graphics subsystem.

Legacy I/O Control Legacy I/O controller for serial port header and Consumer Infrared (CIR)

Peripheral Interfaces
• Twelve USB 2.0 ports: six back panel connectors and six front panel headers
• Two IEEE-1394a interfaces: one back panel connector and one front-panel header
• Six Serial ATA (3 Gbps) interfaces, including one red-colored external Serial ATA (eSATA) interface on the back panel
• One serial port header (may require specialized chassis or cable for use)

LAN Support Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem using the Intel® 82567LF
Gigabit Ethernet Controller

BIOS • Intel® BIOS (resident in the SPI Flash device)
• Support for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), Plug and Play, and SMBIOS

Instantly Available PC Technology
• Support for PCI* Local Bus Specification Revision 2.3
• Support for PCI Express* Revision 1.0a
• Suspend to RAM support
• Wake on PCI, RS-232, front panel, USB ports, LAN, and CIR

Expansion Capabilities
• One PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus add-in card connector
• Two PCI Express x1 bus add-in card connectors
• One PCI Conventional bus connector

Hardware Monitor Subsystem
• Intel® Quiet System Technology implemented through the Intel® Management

Engine (Intel® MEI) in ICH10R
• Voltage sense to detect out of range power supply voltages
• Thermal sense to detect out of range thermal values
• Three fan headers

The DG45ID has full support for lossless BluRay HD audio, DX10 support (on paper), as well as HDCP support. You also receive (for your money) DVI and HDMI ports for HD video out.
This is not what I would call a feature packed board but it is good for an HTPC or entry level system.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
The DG45ID is cramped, but then again what Micro-ATX board is not. Intel did provide a nice amount of clearance around the CPU to allow for a third party cooler to fit. But the layout and overall design is marred by a couple of glaring items. The first is the complete lack of PATA or floppy ports; while I can live without the floppy drive I am still not onboard with the removal of the PATA ports. The other issue is the large heatsink for the MCP; this does get in the way of things and does not seem to keep the MCP exceptionally cool. The I/O back plane has another couple of missing items. There is no D-Sub VGA connection nor are there any PS/2 ports. These items, while not huge issues, are still something to take note of.

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
The BIOS on the DG45ID is about what you would expect from an entry level or HTPC board. I was not happy with some of the defaults though. The default BIOS put the UMA memory usage at 128MB. This is really not enough for good HD playback and when left at this setting seemed to cause some glitches when run at 1080p resolution. The max memory that you can allocate is 256MB. This is half what you can set aside for most AMD 780GX chipsets.

***Update 9/24/2008***
It seems I was incorrect in my statements about the UMA memory settings in the BIOS. According to Intel The DG45ID supports more than 256MB of memory with DVMT5.0 on series 4 chipsets. Also when running Vista the BIOS does not control the amount of memory allocated for Video use as it does with XP.

{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
As this is not an enthusiast board I did not hammer on it like I would if it were a high end chipset. Instead I looked at the common things that might be done on an average HTPC or entry level board.
The system:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale
Intel DG45ID
Kingston KHX9200D2K2/2G DDR2-1150 (running at 800MHz)
Western Digital RaptoX 150GB HDD
Sony SATA DVD-RW
Plextor Blu Ray Drive (in USB enclosure for Blu Ray playback)
Asus PE 9400 Combo TV tuner. (PCI-e x1)
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64
CyberLink PowerDVD 8 Ultra (for Blu Ray playback)

Subsystem performance

Memory
The G45 limits memory speeds to 800MHz, there is no support for speeds above this. But despite that fact I was able to get good memory bandwidth results in both Sisoft’s Sandra and Everest.

Drive Speed:
Drive speed was also fairly good but I did note that my 10k RPM raptor was only showing performance on par with 7200RPM drives on other boards.

Audio:
The Audio on the DG45ID is provided by the IDT 92HD73E with full Dolby Home Theatre certification. I found the audio to be very full and clean. I only noted a couple of minor issues but these seemed to stem from additional audio processing done my Vista Media Center application.

Application Performance
PCMark Vantage:
Always a good base line test of a system, PCMark Vantage is supposed to test how well a system can handle Vista. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the numbers here. I was expecting lower.

HyperPi 0.99b:
I use HyperPi to show performance and stability between the CPU, RAM and HDD.

The DG45ID actually did fairly well here also, it will not win any speed awards but it is still fast enough.

AutoGK 2.45 Transcoding:
Transcoding is a way of life now, if you are not “backing up” your DVDs or Old VHS to watch on your home systems you are moving them to your phone or other portable media player.

The DG45ID shows great promise here even with only a dual core CPU and the slower 800MHz RAM.

{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Gaming Performance:
3DMark Vantage:
While not truly a gaming test 3DMark Vantage does give a reasonable indication of how well you can expect your system to perform during Vista gaming.

Bioshock:
Bioshock is a great game and features basic DX10 support making it a good test for the DX10 compatible DG45ID.

Frames per Second (higher is better)

Wow, all I can say is that my gaming experience with Bioshock was terrible. The game was like watching a very slow slideshow. Even with everything turned off it was unplayable. As for DX10 support, it might be there but the UMA GPU and limited shared memory do not have enough power to use it.

Portal:
Portal uses the same engine as HalfLife2 which is a very forgiving engine, it is also still a DX9 only game making it a good balance for testing the DG48ID.

Frames per Second (higher is better)

Portal was playable but the visual quality was awful. I would not recommend the DG45ID for gaming at all.

HTPC Performance:
Here is where the DG45ID does really shine. I had very good luck with HTPC performance. Blu Ray playback was smooth once I increased the UMA RAM to 256 while audio sounded full and clean.
There were some minor issues with Vista’s Media Center getting the Audio out of Sync after playing a Video file but that is not an issue with the board and seems limited to Vista and the way it process audio when in DVR Mode.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Price/Warranty:
The DG45ID runs $114.99 from Newegg. This is $10 more than AMDs 780GX offering and does not have the same gaming performance or as many options (PATA controllers/ PS/2 ports) as the AMD offering does. Although I can say that the DG45ID does perform better in basic application testing and is considerably faster at video Transcoding I still feel the price is higher than it should be for this product.
All Intel Desktop boards have a three year warranty if purchased from an Intel Distributor and One year if purchased OEM.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I was both impressed and disappointed with the DG45ID, although the basic application performance was great, I was still hoping for a better showing from the UMA GPU. To claim DX10 support I think manufacturers should have to show that it is capable of rending DX10 textures at acceptable resolutions.  To me it is not enough just to throw that label on the box. This is not just a comment about Intel or the DG45ID, it is also about AMD and their 780GX, their DX10 performance is terrible, although they do have the option for Hybrid Crossfire to add extra power for gaming.
Also, given that this is an entry level or HTPC offering it stands to reason that people are not looking to spend a ton of money on a build. However, requiring SATA for your DVD/BluRay drives add money to the build. A quick look at Internet shows that your average PATA BRD (BluRay Disk) burner runs about $160 or so (Low end of $100 and topping out around $189) but the cost of the average SATA drive is Over $210 (with a low end of $139 and topping out at $250) that is a difference of $50 and might put some off of the board.
In the final analysis the DG45ID is priced way to high for the performance I saw. It might be able to play BluRay movies and show HDTV well but the cons far outweigh the small set of pros.

Discussion Link

Not too long ago we took a look at an HTPC board from GIGABYTE with AMD’s 780G chipset on it, the GA-MA78GM-S2H.
This board was fairly nice and would be good enough for most HTPC usage. There was a problem though. When GIGABYTE designed it they did not make it able to support the high-end AMD Phenom X4 CPUs. These CPUs have a TDP of 125W (some up to 140watt). This meant that if you were goofy enough (I really do not know why you would put a 9650 or 9850 on this board) you were out of luck. Well GIGABYTE thought that they would like to change this. But they did not stop there, they went out and redesigned the board and added in a few very nice features.  Today we take a look at this evolved new design in the form of the GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H. 

Product: GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H    
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: August 8th 2008
Product cost: $104.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Discussion Link

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accesories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The MA78GGPM comes is the usual GIGABYTE style box, this one is white with a purple fade. There are also the usual labels and graphs boasting how good the board is.
On the inside we find the board and some basic accessories. Nothing major but then again this is an HTPC/entry level board.

{mospagebreak title=Specs and Features}
Specifications and Features:
The MA78GPM is quite different from the GA-MA78GM-S2H, the biggest difference is the support for 140W TDP CPUs. Next on the list is an integrated 128MB of DDR3 memory running at 1066MHz but which can be overclocked to a decent 1333MHz. GIGABYTE has also added dual BIOS support and interestingly enough they have changed the spec on the Dolby Surround. On the S2H there was full support for DTS on the DS2H we find only Dolby Home Theatre support. The full specs (taken from GIGABYTE’s website are listed below.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Layout:
As with its older sibling they MA78GPM-DS2H is a MicroATX board. This does limit the amount of space available for peripheral slots, etc. GIGABYTE did not do a bad job at all with the layout. Despite the limited space, you do still have the same problem with the placement of the SATA ports (they are right in front of the PCI ports and can restrict airflow). There is also something interesting with the MCP heatsink. This is much larger than the one on the S2H, and has to accommodate a PCI-e x1 sot.  I have a feeling that any card put in that slot will have cooling issues so I would be careful of what you install there. For testing I had an Asus PE9400 Combo TV Tuner and it did get rather warm during testing.
GIGBYTE has loaded up the DS2H I/O port area again throwing in 4 USB ports, Firewire, HDMI, DVI, VGA and a nice selection of other options.

One thing I am sure you will notice. The DVI here only supports DVI-D, you will not be able to use a DVI to VGA analog adapter with this board.

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
BIOS:
The BIOS on the MA78GPM-DS2H is nothing spectacular, but then again as I mentioned above this is not a high-performance mainboard. There are tweaks and some over clocking features but these are very limited. RAM voltage is limited to 1.8v + up to .3v this gives you a vDIMM range of only 1.8 to 2.1v not much and prevents the use of many of the higher end DDR2 modules. There are a couple of redeeming features. It seems GIGABYTE is allowing you to OC the Built in Radeon HD3200 Core speed. The core can be set from 200 to 2000MHz (Default is 500MHz) this as you can imagine will give you a wide range of performance if you can find the right speed setting.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}
Performance:
For testing the MA78GPM-DS2H I wanted to run through most of the options. I did not test overclocking the CPU as most entry level or HTPC users will not be doing that. I did want to test the most obvious BIOS tweaks. These included testing the system with the Side Port memory disabled. Lastly I wanted to test out hybrid Crossfire but I was again not able to get a card that supported Hybrid Crossfire for testing..  All of the GPU intensive tests are lumped together after my application tests.

System:
AMD Phenom X3 8750
GIGABYTE MS78GPM-DS2H
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX9200D2K2/2G
 Western Digital RaptorX 150
Plextor BluRay drive (for BluRay testing)
CoolerMaster 850 Watt PSU
AMD Stock HSF.
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Subsystem:
Memory:
Memory performance was a little less than I expected. I ran the memory at DDR2 800.

HDD:
Again HDD performance was good but not great. If you are looking to use this board as an HTPC platform I highly recommend running two drives for best performance.
Audio:
Audio on the DS2H provided by a RealTek ALC889A CODEC which supports Lossless BluRay audio playback and Dolby Digital Home Theatre support.
Audio quality was very good; I hooked the MA78GPM-DS2H directly to my 7.1 surround system with the Optical SPDiF connector and was very happy with the sound quality. There did not seem to be any impact in performance using the onboard sound CODEC.

Applications:
HyperPi 0.99b:
A good test of CPU to Memory to HDD performance HyperPi runs multiple (one for each core) versions of SuperPi and gives the time to complete. I used the 32M run for my testing. Audio was disabled due to an issue with HyperPi and the Vista Audio subsystem.

AutoGK DivX encoding:
Transcoding is always a good test of a system, especially an HTPC. The MA78GPM does a pretty good job considering the CPU and memory settings used.

PCMark Vantage:
What review would be complete without this test and of course its twin.

For the numbers crowd here is how the MA78GPM-DS2H fared.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Gaming:
3DMark Vantage:
3DMark Vantage is certainly no friend to the 780GPM. I was not able to run this test in performance mode and in the end I had to settle for running it at the “Entry” settings.  Even then he scores were not impressive even while the UMA GPU was overclocked.

You can see all of the results screens here

Bioshock:
Bioshock was simply not playable even with the UMA GPU overclocked. Although it was not a slide show, the game was so sluggish that it was not fun to play at all. Some tweaking and the complete reduction of visual quality would get you playable frame rates but at that point the game loses its feel.

HalfLife 2 Portal:
Portal was very playable at 1280×768 and while it did not look wonderful it had enough visual quality to make playing fun. Overclocking the GPU core speed to 800MHz certainly added some extra performance and would probably allow you to bump up to next higher resolution or enable some additional eye candy.

HTPC Performance:
Since the MA78GPM-DS2H is a perfect board for an HTPC I took a look at HTPC performance including BluRay playback. Using Vista’s built in Media Center and an Asus PE9400 I checked to see how well this system would work as a DVR. For the most part everything ran smoothly, but I would recommend either a larger single drive or two smaller drives with one set to be the recording drive. This will help improve DVR Performance.
BluRay and SD-DVD performance:
For Both BluRay and SD-DVD performance the 78GPM performed very well, BluRay video running HDMI out was crisp and clean. Audio was also sharp. I watched the Fifth Element and I am Legend in BluRay, both of these films were a pleasure to watch running on the GIGABYTE MA78GPM-DS2H,

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The MA78GPM-DS2H will set you back about $105.00 this is not a terribly bad price but is a little more than I would have thought. I was expecting a sub $100 part for the performance that I saw.
Warranty is GIGABYTE’s stock warranty covering defects etc for a period of 3 years from the date of manufacture.
 
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I am not sure what market AMD is pushing the 780G at. I keep hearing how it games better than Intel yet if what I saw is considered better, I am afraid to take a look at the Intel offering. To put it plainly the 78GPM-DS2H is not a gaming board on its own. If you hook up Hybrid Crossfire then maybe you could play games with decent resolutions and eye candy, but not as it is. For basic computing use it is great. The board is somewhat inexpensive (although the price could be lower), fairly quick and has options for future upgrades. For an HTPC system it is perfect. You have a PCI-e x1 slot for a TV tuner, a PCI slot if you want to add in a better sound card (although you could go PCI-e and use the x16 slot) HDMI1.3 support with HDCP, the SidePort memory helps in BluRay playback, and the MicroATX form Factor allows you to slip this into a small and stylish case. So to wrap it up… Gaming – Big No
Basic Entry Level computing – Thumbs up
HTPC use – Two thumbs up and a bag of popcorn.

Discussion Link
 

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.

The specification and contents of the EP45T-DS3R are listed below (taken from GIGABYTE’s website).

{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.

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)

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.

{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.

{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.

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.

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:

3DMark:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Discussion Link
 

As most of you may have noticed, Asus is a big participant in our reviews. Asus is, after all one of the biggest OEMs out there and they make a very high quality product. You can get just about anything computer related from Asus Except for the obvious memory and CPU. Recently we have been fortunate enough to be able to test out Asus’ workstation line, starting with our recent review of the P5E64 WS Evolution. This board is simply an amazing performer but Asus has not stopped there. They have a top of the line board for the Dual CPU crowd. This arrives in the form of the Z7S WS a dual socket Crossfire enabled board based on Intel’s Skull Trail “Seaburg” chipset. Will this new Workstation board satisfy the hardcore enthusiast who laughs at a single CPU? Can Asus bring the level of performance we saw on the Evolution to the Z7S? Read on to find out.

Product: Asus Z7S WS    
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: July 24th 2008
Product cost: $479.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff
Discussion Link

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
Mainboards are arriving in more and more sedate boxes. As the market has grown (the DIY market especially) the boxes have become less gaudy and more professional. The Z7S WS is no exception to this. Its outer shell shows the wireframe outline of a sports car, bringing to mind speed, and power.  Of course on the back are the usual images spotlighting the features of the Z7S with more visible under the front flap.
After opening the box we are greeted with a nice assortment of stuff.  The Z7S WS is bundled with the following extras:
6 x SATA Data Cables
3 x SATA Power Cables
1 x 2 in 1 (IDE & Floppy) Cable Set
1 x I/O Shield
1 x ASUS Motherboard Support CD
1 x User’s Guide
1 x I/O Shield

Also included are a Sound Card for the x1 MIO slot and a diagnostic module.

Features and Specs:
Taken straight from the Asus Site the Z7S WS has the following specifications:

But these specifications do not cover everything; the Z7S has a few nice features.
Crossfire Support – The Z7S Ws supports Crossfire with 2 PCI-e 2.0 full x16 slots
DDR2 FBDIMM 800MHz support  – Traditionally the bottle neck for Xeon based workstation boards the Z7S bring support for faster FBDIMM RAM.
PCI-e 2.0
e-SATA – Asus calls this “SATA on the go” there are two e-SATA ports on the board for extra storage.
Digital Voltage Regulation – The Z7S uses the more efficient Digital Voltage regulation to ensure that your system gets the power it needs.
The Z7S is a nice little package on paper. Now we need to see how it holds up in the real world.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Layout:
They layout of the Z7S WS is unfortunately not that good. The CPU sockets are very close together preventing the use of most third party coolers for the Xeon.  There are also two large and one small heat sink in the way, one on the Northbridge, one for the Southbridge, and one on the DVM.  
The RAM slots and CPU sockets have been reversed (which is good) There are Six Slots for RAM available with an interesting configuration for channels. The first four follow the normal two slot- per-channel layout we are used to while the last two are single slot channels.
The rest of the board is just plain cramped. The top PCI-e x16 slot is useless for any of your longer cards as the heatsink for the Southbridge gets in the way. I put a 9800GTX in this slot and the card not only touched the metal on the heat sink it also prevented the use of the PATA IDE slot and partially obscured the 4-pin Aux ATX power plug.  To properly use this slot with the longer cards you would have to abandon PATA devices and remove several fins from the SB heatsink (or perhaps replace it altogether). In the end I had to move my 9800GTX down to PCI-e slot 2, this required me to use the PCI-X slot for my Xonar card as the standard PCI slot was now covered by the cooler for the 9800GTX. I was able to put both an ATi 3850 and 4850 in this top slot but the clearance was very close.

Some nice but hard to use (once installed in a case) features are a bank of dip switches that allow you to set the fan headers on the board from controlled (4-pin) to uncontrolled (3-pin) a full USB slot for a USB TPM key or other security dongle, having it inside the case is great protection, and a place for an optional TPM chip or Diagnostic Module.

Even with these extras the layout is not good at all and as with Evolution the performance better be stellar to bring up our opinion.

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}

BIOS:
I was a little disappointed with the BIOS, normally Asus packs so many settings into their BIOSes that  you get confused. With the Z7S things were very limited. There were no setting for memory and very few settings for the CPUs. I was shocked that there were very few adjustments for voltage.

These adjustments are also very poorly labeled. The adjustment for vDIMM was labeled as “1.8v Dual Adjustment”. The only other voltage options were for the north and south bridge. For an Asus board I found the BIOS seriously lacking.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}

Performance:
For my performance testing I did a comparison to the Intel  S5000XVN Workstation board.  I wanted to see if Asus would be able to give us true workstation performance and gaming to boot. This decision led me to use a single high end GPU for both systems.The configuration for each system was identical:

2 x Intel Xeon X5365 Processors (Quad Core 3.0GHz 1333MHz FSB)
4 GB (2x2GB) Kingston 667MHz FBDIMMs
3x Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 ST373454SS 74GB 15k RPM SAS HHDs (RAID 5)
3x 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST380815AS SATA II 3.0G HDDs (single drives)
LSI Logic LSI00118 PCI Express SAS MegaRAID 8344ELP 128MB
1 Sony DVD-RW
Asus Xonar D2
NZXT Sentry LX
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N
Cooler Master UCP 1100 PSU
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 running on the RAID 5 Array
The mainboards tested were
Intel S5000XVN and of course the Asus Z7S WS

Microsoft Windows Vista was Installed fresh for each board and updated to SP1 additional updates were noted for the first test run so that the update level for each would be identical.
Onboard Audio was tested separately for the Z7S WS. The Xonar was used to enable additional EAX sounds used in gaming.

Subsystem testing

Memory:
The memory subsystem on the Z72 includes support for 800MHz FB-DIMMs This is a nice improvement over the S5000XVN. But more than that the 5400 series chipset has improved memory performance. The Z7S showed a nice increase in memory performance over the S5000VXN even with the 667MHz FB-DIMMs. This boost is good news as traditionally the major bottle neck with the dual Xeons has been memory.

Drive and Bus Speed:
This test shows not only the speed of the on-board SATA controller but the speed of the PCI-e Bus.

There was no clear cut winner here. Both boards have very fast drive controllers and can handle the bandwidth needs of the LSI MegaRAID

Audio:
Here the Z7S wins hands down the PCI-e x1 based external audio codec on the Z7S runs rings around the on-board audio CODEC on the S5000VXN. The addition of both optical and Coaxial SPDIF out just add to the Z7S ZS, additionally if you chose to use a third party card you can disable the slot and free up system resources.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Applications}
Application Testing
FutureMark:
As usual I include the FutureMark tests for the numbers crowd. But these tests can be used to give a base line performance number and can help to trouble shoot performance issues. They are not (nor is any other synthetic) truly representative of real world system performance.

While not a big surprise the Z7S shows a good performance gain over the older S5000VXN.

Lightwave 9.3 x64:
Lightwave 3D 9.3 is one of the market standards for 3D digital animation.
For testing I use the Lightwave 8.0 content CD. From here I take the Moonbase scene and use frame 32 for my render. Settings for Lightwave are shown below as well as the results for both boards.

Time in Minutes and Seconds (lower is better)

The Z7S shows it improved performance here again.

CineBench R10:
From Maxon, Cinebench is based off of the same render engine used in Cinema4D. It is meant to show how well your system can handle rendering using this application.

Here we see one more win for the Z7S, we also find that the Z7S’ 5400 chipset is better at combining the power of both CPUs.

HyperPi .099b
HyperPi is a nice application that allows you to run multiple versions of the XS SuperPi Mod.
This test can show performance of the CPU, Memory, and HDD as well as the system’s ability to transfer data between these components.

The Z7S shows off again with a very large 10+ second lead.

AutoGK Video Transcoding:
Video transcoding (the changing of a video file from one format to another) is a part of computing. Most users do this now, even the most basic novice. I like to use AutoGK as it uses multiple cores, and includes all of the applications I might need for transcoding. For testing I use a 2-1/2 hour DVD of personal footage. This DVD was authored using DVD Studio Pro HD.

I am sure by now the winner is no surprise the Z7S with the 5400 series chipset wins again.

PhotoShop CS3
What workstation board evaluation would be complete without a run through of Photoshop? For my testing I used Driver Heaven’s Photoshop test.

The Z7S WS betters the S5000VXN in almost all filters and wins in overall time.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Gaming}
Gaming:
All game testing is done at 1920×1200 resolution with AA and AF settings maxed out. Frame Rate and all screen shots were captured using FRAPS.

BioShock:
Bioshock is one of my favorite games, with good graphics, including DX10 textures and great game play.
For my testing I ran the Welcome to Rapture level from just after you get the Electrobolt Plasmid until the end of the level. Settings are shown below.

Again the Z7S is the better performer in both average FPS and minimum.

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
Call of Duty, Modern Warfare is a great game. This title combines a good story great graphics and a better than average “bar fight” AI. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” mission. Settings are shown below.

Once again the Z7S is out in front.
Assassin’s Creed:
Our second DX10 (well DX10.1) Assassin’s Creed is a good third person game with a healthy story and good interactivity. It does have far too many cut scenes for my tastes but is good for system testing. For my testing I ran the first memory only. This took me from introduction through being sent on a mission outside of the village. Settings are shown below. 

I think by now a pattern is becoming clear, the Z7S is simply a better board for gaming than the S5000VXN.

Crossfire Support:
As you have noticed above I included 4850 and 4850 Crossfire scores only for the Z7S WS. This was due to my not having the 4850s when this evaluation started. Also the S5000VXN is only PCIe 1.0 compatible.
I therefore show only the performance you can expect in Crossfire over single card on the Z7S. The difference is quite nice. This added feature makes the Z7S WS an even better board than other Workstation boards for the Xeon 5000 series.

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The Z7S WS like the P5E64 WS Evolution, is not an inexpensive board. It will set you back about $480.00.
This price is nothing to thumb your nose at. For many the cost of the Z7S combine with the cost of two 5000 series Xeon CPUs will be too much. But for the prosumer or professional that needs high-end workstation performance and likes to game the Z7S is almost a one of a kind as it fills these needs quite handily. Another factor in the Z7S’ favor is that the Intel SkullTrail board is over $600, this puts the Z7S in a much better light given its performance and lower price tag.

Warranty on the Z7S WS is the same three year warranty as with the consumer mainboards from Asus.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusions:
I was very impressed with the Z7S WS’ performance. I had thought there would be some performance gain but did not expect to see as much as I did. Even with identical hardware setups the Z7S simply outperformed the S5000VXn from Intel. I do wish the BIOS were better done and had more tweaks, but that might have made the board too difficult to get stable. The lack of the SLI support present on the Intel based Skulltrail boards is a mixed bag On the one hand it would have been nice, on the other hand the NV200 bridge causes issues and makes a board very unstable and prone to heat and voltage issues not to mention the extra cost of adding this in.
Board layout is a problem and will make keeping your Xeons cool without going deaf a problem. As well as the need to carefully choose the GPUs you use, a 4870 or 4870×2 would have a rough time on this board. These items do require some thought to be put into any purchase plans that include the Z7S WS, but when you look at the performance advantage and the extra features (not to mention the lower cost than the Intel alternative) the Z7S WS is going to be at the top of any Dual Xeon workstation shipping list.

Discussion Link
I would like to thank Eric Chen at Asus for his help in putting together the Z7S WS evaluation.

Asus has been a frequent flyer here on the Planet, most notably because of their recent decision to enter ALL parts of the computer and consumer electronics market. We have seen notebooks, mainboards, GPUs, and just about everything in between. For now we have finally managed to get one of Asus’ workstation boards in house. The X48 based P5E64 WS Evolution. This board boasts power efficiency and performance. Offering four x16 PCI-e slots(2 full x16 and 2 x4), an SAS option (called SASaby) and support for two separate RAID configurations, the Evolution looks to be quite a board on paper. Today we will tell you if that paper translates into the real world or is it just fiction.

Product: Asus P5E64 WS Evolution     
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: July 4th 2008
Product cost: $369.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

Forum Link

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The P5E64-WS Evolution arrived in a blue box (maybe blue for Intel?) on the box was a graphic of a wireframe 3D car partially rendered as well as what looks like some CAD drawings. I guess this is supposed to let us know that the Evolution is meant for a serious workstation. On the outer slipcover there is a flap that you can open to view additional information on how great the P5E64 is.
Once you remove the slipcover and open the box the real fun begins. Inside the box are a host of nice toys to go with the P5E64.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
I have, in the past, gone on and on about board layout and its importance. With the P5E64 I will touch on this again. The Evolution is not all that well thought out in terms of layout. But I cannot fault Asus directly as this has become a trend with all mainboards. I think we have reached a point where the desire to use multiple GPUs is preventing manufacturer’s ability to make a well laidout product. Slots have to be too close to use all of them; you are left with having to make decisions and compromises. If you want multiple GPUs you might end up stuck with onboard sound, as the PCI slots are covered. The same thing applies with PhysX cards or other peripherals that you might want to add in. It is true that more and more peripherals are coming in PCI-e flavors but you still are left with limited choices.

Another item of note is the placement of the four PCi-e ports. They are setup in pairs, the two blue are the primary pair while the two black are the secondary pair. Now the thought of running Quad Crossfire is very nice indeed but you are not going to be doing that with any of the higher end cards (ones with dual slot coolers) this reduces the functionality of the four slots for most enthusiasts. The top PCI-e x16 slot is also right on top of the RAM slots making easy installation and removal of RAM an impossibility.
The PCI-e x4 slot is the only slot on the board that seems to be in a good spot. Although you have to watch the length of your card here or it will hit the RAM.

Air space around the CPU is well done considering the towering heatsinks needed to keep the X48 Northbridge and power regulators cool. Asus, as is common, includes a small fan to keep air flow moving through these if you are using water cooling on your CPU. Although this makes for a cooler X48 board the placement of the 8-Pin Aux power connector at the top of the board makes installation in a mid-tower case a bleeding knuckle exercise.
Asus also decided to go with a ton of Blue LEDs these do have a function and are primarily there to let you know if your cards are in the slots properly (taking a leaf from ECS’ book) they have also surrounded the Asus logo with Blue LEDs these strobe from dim to bright and bathe the inside of your case in a friendly blue glow.

Our impression of the evolution at this point is: pretty but not very functional. Performance needs to be stellar to bring our opinion back up.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}
Performance:
Test system:
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2GX DDR3-1625MHz
Asus 3850 Smart OC 1GB DDR2
Western Digital 150GB RaptorX HDD
PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU.
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooling kit
HiSpeed PC techstation
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate w/SP1
Subsystems:
Most know that a mainboard is not a single component but is comprised of many separate subsystems that have to work together properly to give you good performance. The following three subsystems are the main ones that directly impact performance on most mainboards.

Overclocking:
I found something interesting while playing with the Evolution, it did not like overclocking my QX9770.
This is not to say that I could not get a high OC. I was able to get up to 4.4 GHz I was also able to get a respectable 475 FSB by playing with the settings. The issue came with performance. Once I hit a certain speed with the Quad (over 4.1GHz or 450MHz FSB) I found the system slowed down considerably especially in Multi-Core testing.

Now 450MHz FSB is nothing to sneeze at, but I would have thought the x48 would do much better and that the DDR3 I was using from Kingston would not drop the way it did.
In the end I found the best performance and most stable OC was 450MHz x9 using the same DDR3 1600 from Kingston running at DDR3-1800. Timings were 8-8-8-24.

Audio:
The P5E64 WS Evolution uses the SoundMAX AD1988B audio codec for sound reproduction. This is a nice little audio chip that can produce some good sound, but comes at a cost in some games and during BluRay HD playback. I noticed an increased in CPU time when running HalfLife 2 Episode 2 in 7.1 mode and while watching any of my BluRay movies. Now the increased CPU usage did not affect the video playback with BluRay but did cause some stuttering in HalfLife 2 during heavy combat. Switching to 5.1 fixed this issue though.

Drive Performance:
HDD performance is on par with what you would expect from an X48/X38 mainboard, the option for two discrete RAID arrays is very nice but using both does increase CPU and memory overhead. I would not recommend this with anything less than 4GB of DDR3 1600.

Memory Access and Bandwidth:
Memory bandwidth is not a constant nor are most measurements truly accurate.  With that in mind we always take a look at the numbers we get as bandwidth potential. Meaning that this is what you might be able to get in the right circumstances. The P5E64 WS does very well and in my testing actually seems to handle DDR3 better than the reference Intel DX48BT2 board that I tested.

Application and Synthetics:
For application testing I ran the usual suspects and put the P5E64 WS through the paces at stock and at maximum stable OC.
FutureMark:
What evaluation would be complete without a couple of benches from FutureMark?
We ran both 3DMark and PCMark Vantage and took a look at the numbers.

The P5E64 WS performs as good as we expect with the 3850. Crossfire performance is a healthy improvement while our CPU overclock does not give much of a boost at all.

PCMark does well on the Evolution and shows a nice boost from our CPU overclock

HyperPi:
A great test for system I/O performance. HyperPi runs multiple instances of SuperPi MOD. Each instance is run on its own core. This test hits CPU memory and HDD performance hard.

The 18 minute times for a 32M HyperPi run are at the faster end of what the X48 is capable. Our overclock on this board was able to shave over a full minute off of the time.

Lightwave 3D x64:
Newtek’s Lightwave is an industry standard for 3D modeling and animation.  This test also hits system I/O very hard.

Lightwave shows off the power of the QX9770 combined with the X48. Our overclock managed to knock 0ver 30 seconds off the the already fast sub five minute render time here.

Video Encoding:
Our video encoding tests were run with a  2:30 movie written to a standard 9.4 GB Dual layer disk.
This was then encoded back to Avi at 100% quality.

AutoGK shows the Evolutions speed in moving data from CPU to Mem and then to HDD. With our overclock we manage to know over two minutes off of the encoding time.

Photoshop CS3
Testing in Photoshop was centered on image manipulation. For testing I used the Driverheaven Photoshop benchmark.

I was very impressed with the way the Evolution coupled with the QX9770 and the Kingston RAM handled Photoshop. They seemed to move through the filters with out effort.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Gaming:
For gaming tests on the P5E64 ES Evolution I ran three current games in single card and Crossfire mode.
Resolutions were maxed at 1920×1200. Game settings are shown with each game.  All testing was “in-game” frame rates were captured using FRAPs.

Bioshock:
Performance here with the 3850 in single card mode is not the greatest  even when overclocked. The DX10 textures show their greed here.(although with the Asus 3850 SmartOC you can get quite a jump in performance by using the smartoc button look for a full review on these soon )
on the other hand in crossfire mode I saw a huge performance increase. The jump from 27 to 72 FPS is simply amazing.

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
Again in COD4 we see less than impressive gaming numbers but as mentioned above this is due to the GPU used and not a fault of the board. The board is clearly capable of more as the 8 FPS jump in our overclock testing shows.

Also the performance on the Evolution shows in the 42 FPS jump while in Crosfire mode even with the older 3850.

Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
Another bad showing for the P5E64/3850 combination, with average frame rates under 20. Overclocked gives the this combo a 8 FPS boost (as with other games) And again the Evolution shows it ability to handle crossfire with ease brining in a 30+ FPS jump over single card mode.

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The Asus P5E64 WS Evolution will put a $370 dent in your wallet (for many this dent may run completely through their wallets) It is not a board mean for the average consumer. But it is designed to give the enthusiast the best X4) It is not a board mean for the average consumer. But it is designed to give the enthusiast the best X48 performance to be had and runs circles around the Intel DX48BT2.

The warranty on the Evolution is the usual three year limited from Asus and covers defects in workmanship. Lately Asus has come under criticism for its lack of support and slow support site; for the most part these claims have been justified. Calling or e-mailing their support lines (at the time of writing) can be a very frustrating endeavor. I have spoken to a few people at Asus and have been assured that they are working to correct these support issues. I do not know how or when things will change but feel the support problems have arisen due to the massive growth that Asus has seen in the last few years.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
Performance at stock speeds was quick and responsive. I have never been happy with just running a few tests to get a feel for a product, so I have been using the Evolution as my workstation at home while not testing. In normal use I found the P5E64 to perform very well indeed.
Overclocking, as I mentioned above was a little different than what I was used to. I found that leaving the sub-timings alone produced better results, there was also an issue with overclocking a quad on the P5E64 but I think this is more a limitation of the CPU/chipset than the Asus design. In all I was able to get a very respectable 24/7 OC of 450×9 (4050MHz) with the Kingston DDR3 memory running at 1800MHz. this  OC provided me with a nice boost to all applications I use for testing. Asus has also been able to overcome the X48 overheating problems; the heat pipe system cooling the X48 and power regulators around the CPU was able to keep me from overheating even while overclocked.  Although board layout was not well done I can honestly say that after a few hiccups the Evolution more than made up for layout issues with solid performance and power.
If you are looking around for a fast solid board and have a deep pocket the Asus P5E64 WS Evolution is the board your cash is looking to be spent on.

We are happy to give the P5E64 WS Evolution our Best on the Planet award for its power and performance.

Forum Link
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Eric Chen at Asus for his help in putting this evaluation together.

Product: Intel DX48BT2 Extreme Series Mainbaord      
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: May 14th 2008
Product cost: $249.99
Manufacturer: Intel
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The DX48BT2 ships in a “sexy” black box with an interesting graphical design on it.
A logo proclaiming it as part of the Extreme Series is visible on the top.

Inside we find some rather nice loot, rounded cables (PATA and Floppy), large easy to read “quick” start guide and a few SATA cables (Data and Power).
Also in the box are a bracket to mount a small fan on the NorthBridge and a cap for the Southbridge.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}

Layout:
The DX48BT2 is not the best laid out board. As you can see there are many cases where slots will be overlapped if depending on the options you chose for GPU and sound. The two x16 PCI-e 2.0 ports are arranged in such a way that is Crossfire is used you will lose one of your two PCI ports. The final PCI-e 1.1 x4 port can also interfere with the remaining PCI port depending on the card. There are no x1 slots on this board from some reason although having one above the top x16 PCI-e slot would have been nice for a sound card.

The 6 on-board SATA ports are nicely spaced to avoid any longer video cards like the 9800 or 8800GTX.
The complete lack of PS/2 ports will be annoying for anyone that is using an older KVM, or does not have a USB Keyboard and mouse.  Dual e-SATA ports on the back I/O bank are a nice touch.
I was surprised that the NorthBrigde had only a simple heatsink. Intel did provide a way to mount a fan but did not provide a fan.

In all I found the DX48BT2 to be a little difficult to work with once mounted but nothing that would make it unusable by enthusiasts.

Additional images of the board layout can be found here

{mospagebreak title=BIOS}

BIOS:
The Intel BIOS leaves a lot to be desired for an “Extreme” system. There were many missing items and other items were not easy to use or understand.

All of the overclocking options can be found in the performance menu.
Here you have sections for CPU, Memory and Bus tweaking.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Applications}
Performance:
The DX48BT2 performed well running Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM. I did run into a few issues with using a 9800GTX but Intel was quick with a BIOS patch to fix this issue.

For testing I broke everything down into a three parts Subsystems (Audio, HDD performance, Memory performance etc), Application and Gaming.
While I do use some synthetic testing I tend to keep to real world (and reproducible) tests.
Games are always tested using FRAPS while playing a predetermined level. Due to the impossibility of playing a level the same way twice I run each game through three times and take the average of Minimum, Maximum and Average for the game.
Test system:
Intel Core2 Extreme QX9770
Intel DX48BT2
4GB (4x1GB) Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2 DDR3
74GB Western Digital 10,000 RPM Raptor HDD
Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
Sony Generic 16x DVD-ROM
PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU.
HSPC Tech Station
Corsair Nautilus 500 was used for cooling.

Subsystems:
Memory:
The DX48BT2 Supports DDR3 running at speeds of up to 1600MHz. When combined with a 1600MHz FSB CPU this improves basic performance by removing the memory bottleneck from the system.

Hard Drive:
Sporting the ICHR9 (same as the X38) the DX48BT2 has pretty good I/O bandwidth to move your data.
The only problems I ran into with the ICHR9 was when I setup RAID and during overclocking, I was not able to pin down the exact issue with RAID but it seemed to bog down when I used RAID sets larger than two drives. This left RAID 5 performance in the gutter (a problem I have seen on other Intel SATA controllers). The issue surrounding overclocking was simple. The ICHR9 was not able to keep up. The majority of my lock-ups, reboots, and BSODs during overclocking all stemmed from this controller.

Sound CODEC:
For audio the X48 uses the Intel High Definition Audio Interface, the brains of this is the IDT STAC9274D Audio codec. This supports 7.1 and 2 channel audio reproduction.  Both Analog and Digital 7.1 sound is supported on the I/O back plane.

Application:
Our application testing is a combination of synthetic and real world applications. Each one is designed to highlight different aspects of performance.

PCMark Vantage:
The DX48BT2 scores pretty well on PCMark Vantage, this is primarily due to the extra memory bandwidth and the higher FSB range.

LightWave 9.3 x64:
LightWave was a good performer on the X48, again I feel this is due to the increased memory bandwidth available from the DDR3 1600 I was using.

Cinebench R-10:
Cinebench R-10 is a synthetic render test that breaks out CPU and GPU performance, the DX48BT2 performed very well in on this test.

HyperPi 0.99b:
HyperPi scores were very good. I was surprised as HDD performance was a little under what I am used to from other boards.

Divx Encoding with AutoGK 2.4.5:
Again another solid performance by the DX48BT2 If you are going to consider this as an encoding system I would think about setting up a RAID 0 array for the destination to keep up with the memory and CPU. I felt that HDD write speeds were a bottle neck in this test.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Gaming}

Gaming:
All of our gaming tests run on the DX48BT2 were done “in-game” with maximum settings enabled. Sound was also set to 5.1 surround. I used the analog outputs to force the maximum codec usage.
Frame rates were captured using FRAPS each game was run through the same level three times with an average of these runs for the final score.

The DX48BT2 running at stock speed with DDR3-1600 and an 8800GTX was a formidable gaming system.
Even with all of the games maxed out the 8800GTX/ DX48BT2 combo did not falter. Every title we tested had Frame rates over 40 FPS. Bioshock came in over 60 and Call of Duty 4 was over 80. Settings and actual results for each game are shown below.

Bioshock:

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare:

Grid (Demo):

{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}
Overclocking:
Overclocking the DX48BT2, like any other board, was an exercise in patience. I ran into many interesting issues, from the RAM dropping down to odd dividers to issues with the ICHR9 controller.
In the end I was able to pull out a decent overclock at 440×10 for a 4.4GHz OC this was (unfortunately) at 1.5v so it would not be something you would run 24/7, even though it was fairly stable. Memory was set to run at 880MHz timings were set to 8-8-8-22 at 1.98v.
Interestingly enough CPU temps stayed around 50c. The NorthBridge became hot very quickly, I would recommend getting a fan for this if you plan to OC the DX48BT2, or even better get water cooling.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
Price :
The DX48BT2, as part of the extreme series, does not carry an extreme price. With a price tag of around $250 the DX48BT2 from Intel was one of the more moderately priced x48 offerings I was able to find on the internet.

Warranty:
I had a tough time finding out exactly how long the warranty is on the DX48BT2. I checked Intel’s site and found that it could be one or three years but nothing to tell me which. In the end I contacted them and asked directly. Intel responded the same day and explained to me that all Intel Desktop boards have a three year warranty if purchased from an Intel Distributor and One year if purchased OEM.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
After using the DX48BT2 for a few days I felt that it was more stable than the X38 boards I have used even with the IHCR9 issues that I encountered. It did not OC as well as I would have liked, but that may have been due to the CPU I was using (Quads still do not OC very well). The lack of an included fan for the Northbridge was also a minus for this board. I was not fond of the layout and it presented me with problems when I went to setup the board (with my configuration). However, even with these issues stock performance was great. I had no problems running any of the apps I wanted to throw at the DX48BT2. Gaming was smooth and responsive, once the issue with the 8800 and 9800GTXs were resolved by the techs at Intel.  Sound was crisp for an onboard Codec and did not seem to hinder gaming performance. Heat was an issue though, as I mentioned the Northbridge gets very hot, and Intel did not provide a in the box, I would recommend that you go and grab one even if you have no plans to overclock. I can recommend the X48 for users looking to upgrade to DDR3 from older DDR2 systems but, with the X58 and P45 around the corner it might be best to sit tight and wait to see what the gang at Intel will have in a couple of months.

Introduction:
The GIGABYTE that we know today got its start in 1986 as a research and development company. From there they have moved into the forefront of computer and electronics design and manufacturing. GIGABYTE offers some of the most innovative designs in mainboards and graphics cards you can find. With their amazing line of Silent II midrange GPUs as well higher end GPUs and mainboards GIGABYTE has made a name for itself in the increasingly fickle computer market.
Today we take a look not at the top of the line, but at a product aimed at the HTPC and entry level market the GA-MA78GM-S2H this board boasts an integrated DX10 compatible GPU. Let’s see how well it does.

Product: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H       
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: April 2^nd 2008
Product cost: $99.00 to $105.99 (online pricing)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Jason Hambly

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}

Packaging and Accessories:
I have noticed a trend in computer parts packaging that I am beginning to like. Gone are the cartoon characters that have nothing to do with the hardware inside as well as all of the garish colors. Manufacturers are now using more visually subdued packaging while maintaining enough flash to grab the eye. Once they have caught your eye they allow you to read the virtues of the product by carefully placed logos and small paragraphs of information. The GA-MA78GM-S2H follows this trend. The box is a slate grey in the center fading to white at the outer edges, in the center is a single graphic of an “S” with a “2” in the lower curve of the S. Above this are the logos pronouncing the features of the mainboard inside.

Once you do open the box you will find that GIGABYTE was very sparing with the accessories they put in the box providing only 2 SATA, 1 floppy and 1 PATA cable along with the I/O shield, manual and drivers/utility CD-ROM you are not paying for any extras here. Underneath this sparse haul we find the GA-MA78GM safely wrapped in a static bag waiting to be put through its paces.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}

Board Layout:
The layout of a mainboard can have a big impact on its use and performance. Poor placement of drive ports, PCI and PCIe slots, CPU socket and memory slots can not only make a board difficult to use but also hinder airflow. This produces pockets of hot air around components which in turn affect the performance of the parts.
The GA-MA78GM-S2H has a decent layout and provides for good airflow. The placement of the SATA ports is a little odd though. For some reason GIGABYTE chose to put the ports vertical instead of horizontal. This puts multiple SATA cables in front of the PCI slots, exactly where most cases have their HDD fans, this could prevent air flow across any cards in these slots. Something that caught my eye as I looked over this board was a series of pins labeled TPM, it would seem that the MA78GM has support for an add-in TPM (Trusted Platform Module) this would allow users to take advantage of the Bitlocker feature in Vista Ultimate, although I am not sure where you would purchase one.

The I/O ports on the back are rather impressive for a UMA board. With an e-SATA port, HDMI, Optical SPDiF out DVI, 1394a, and 4 USB ports the MA78GM is pretty loaded up.

{mospagebreak title=Features and BIOS}
Features and Bios:

Features:
The MA78GM-S2H is not what you would call a feature packed board, but it is also not devoid of them.
The biggest of them (and the most suspect) is the DX10 support. This is displayed proudly on the box and on the actual board itself. But can a UMA GPU with shared memory have enough moxie to deal with the advanced API of DX10? It is something we wanted to know as well and is covered in more detail below. One other feature that is wrapped up in the GPU is the HDMI output with HDCP support. This is certainly a nice feature if you plan on building the MA78GM into your next HTPC box. Next on the GPU features list is AMD’s Hybrid graphics support, this allows you to combine the power of an additional AMD (3000 series) GPU with the onboard 780 GPU to power high-end gaming. Not too bad when you consider the cost of the MA78GM and one of the lower prices AMD cards.

Additional features of the board come in the form of external connectivity. GIGABYTE, as with most of their board, have given the MA78GM USB, Firewire and e-SATA ports to satisfy all of your external needs. BluRay lossless audio support Digital Optical out and support for an add-in TPM module round out the extras on the MA78GM.

BIOS:

The BIOS on the GA-MA78GM is pretty functional for a micro-ATX board. It has many features you would expect on higher end boards and allows for a decent amount of tweaking to get the most out of your system.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words (and several hours of typing):

{mospagebreak title=Performance I} 

Performance:

Test system:
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H Mainboard
AMD X2 5000+ Black Edition
2GB Kingston KHX7200D2K2/2G 
1x 74GB Western Digital Raptor HDD
16x Sony DVD-ROM
Generic 1.44” Floppy
Mushkin 1.1KW PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooler

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (x86 and x64 versions)

System Tests:

Memory:
The memory subsystem on the MA78GM is driven by the AMD CPU that you use on the board. If, for example, you had a CPU with a 2GHz memory controller you would get better performance from your memory than if you are using a 1GHz or 1.8GHz memory controller. With the 5000+ , which has a 1GHz memory controller I was able to get pretty good results from the Kingston DDR2 800 that I was working with, of course memory performance is going to be hindered slightly by the shared video memory. For my testing I had the shared memory amount set to 512MB. This allowed me to set resolutions up to 1920×1200 and helped with gaming and video playback performance, but had an effect on system memory performance as you can see from the screen shots below.

Audio:

The audio on the MA78GM was surprisingly good, the sound in gaming and DVD playback was rich a full without any noticeable stutters or anomalies in reproduction.

BluRay playback was also very good. 

Drive Performance:
Drive performance was a little less than what I expected it would seem that the overall file system performance is hindered by the shared memory. But if you are using this as an HTPC or an entry level system you should not notice any significant performance hit.

Application performance:

PCMark Vantage:
PCMark Vantage is a decent platform for testing how well your system can handle today’s multimedia computer experience. What does this mean? Well it means that in today’s computing world everything is driven by a multimedia experience. Simply browsing a web site is an assault of video and flash animation. Installing a program often has embedded flash or shock wave. Consumers are doing more and more with their PCs and PCMark Vantage is there to let you know if your system can handle it.

The MA78GM did not do too badly here, with the glaring performance hit being in gaming.

For most other multimedia applications the MA78GM should do quite nicely.

For movies and TV the results were very interesting, running 32bit applications for playback caused the system to have some major issues and resulted in the score dropping over 100 points.

3DMark06:
3DMark06 is a synthetic test from Futuremark that is designed to test your system’s ability to run 3D games. Although this will soon be replaced by 3DMark Vantage it is still a good test to get a feel for how your system will perform.

Hmm, something odd here… on the cover of the box there is a large sticker stating that the MA78GM was able to achieve a score of 1500, but try as I might I could not get over 1200. This might be due to different system setups, perhaps they used a VERY light version of XP but be that as it may there is very little hope of grabbing that 1500 point mark on the average system.

Divx Encoding:
Divx encoding is a good overall performance test as it uses just about every I/O subsystem. For my encoding tests I use AutoGK version 2.4.5 and encode a 1.5 hour sample movie (not copyright protected) on DVD and encode it directly to the OS hard drive at 100% quality.

Time is in Hours, Minutes, and Seconds 

My encoding tests were about what I would have expected, with times averaging about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Not the fastest encoding platform but certainly not the slowest.

Super PI:
I have now switched to using HyperPi 0.99b for my SuperPi testing; this uses the XS Mod version of SuperPi to calculate the number PI out to a ridiculous number of decimal places ranging from a few thousand to 32 million. This test is also a great test to measure stability between the memory, HDD and CPU in multi-core systems. If you have any errors in that loop SuperPi will fail, if there are any bottle necks your times will reflect it.

The times for SuperPi were about what you would expect, perhaps on the slow side but nothing major.
{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Gaming Performance:

HalfLife 2 Portal:
Valve’s Portal is an amazing game, not only for its great graphics and physics effects but for its tongue-in-cheek humor and great mini-story line. Valve has us craving more of GLaDOS and the portal gun. But is this a game you could play on the MA78GM?
We left everything set to default for our gaming test (as shown in the screen shots below) and ran through the first few levels to see how well it ran.

On the whole Portal was fairly playable at these settings, I would not want to game like this for an extended period of time as the game seemed sluggish and not responsive. Additional tweaking of the settings did yield a more playable game but at a heavy cost in visual quality.

Frames Per Second captured using FRAPS 9.2.4 (higher is better)

Bioshock:
Bioshock was my game of choice to see if the MA78GM could truly handle DX10 surfaces and textures. Set in an underwater utopia-gone-bad, Bioshock is reminiscent of some of Looking Glass Studios’ other titles such as SystemShock One and Two (“why are you running you worthless bag of meat and bones?”) Where the hero is constantly guided and antagonized by unseen voices as he moves through the landscape, you also have many options as how to build up your character by choosing different Plasmids (genetic altering material that “enhances” your abilities) to make your character more powerful.

In all it is a very engaging and entertaining game. Again, as with Portal, I ran my testing at default settings, this included DX 10 Surfaces.

I have to say that testing Bioshock on this mainboard was one of the most tedious things I have done. While not exactly a slideshow the frame rates were so slow as to be maddening.

Frames Per Second captured using FRAPS 9.2.4 (higher is better)

Turning off DX10 textures improved performance to slightly less than dreadful.

After tinkering around I was able to get a playable game but this came at the cost of all visual effects and about as boring a game as you can imagine.

Gaming performance conclusion:
Although I only tested two games I feel that if you are going to announce DX10 compatibility then your system should at least be able to handle it. Sadly the MA78GM was not able to. I am sure that there are games that will run quite well but these will be older games without the newer effects and textures. Perhaps if you add in a second GPU and take advantage of the hybrid graphic you could play these games but then you are may as well get a better board without the UMA GPU and buy the discrete card in the first place. To put it simply the MA78GM is not a gaming platform by itself and should not be marketed as one at all.

Video Playback Performance:
This was an easy one to test, all I had to do was hook up my HDTV using the HDMI port, plug in my BluRay drive and sit down with a couple of movies. Video playback was outstanding with no jumping frames no visible ghosting and no sound artifacts. Even watching Divx or Xvid files did not seem to affect video playback performance.

{mospagebreak title=Price\Warranty}

Price/Warranty:

Price:
You can find the GA-MA78GM-S2H for the low price of $99.00 at NewEgg and as high as $105 elsewhere on the Internet. This is a very good price considering the what you are actually getting with HDMI and HDCP support straight from the UMA GPU, good quality audio and Hybrid graphics support.

Warranty:

GIGABYTE offers a three year limited warranty on all of its mainboard products. RMA is setup through the GIGABYTE website.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The GA-MA78GM-S2H is a nice little mainboard if you are looking for a basic entry level system or a board for an HTPC. In both of these capacities it performs rather well.
Where things fall apart is in the realm of gaming. I cannot see how AMD could pronounce this to have DX10 support (other than the fact that you can turn these settings on) as the UMA GPU fails terribly when under the stress of DX10 surfaces and textures.
Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I cannot say enough for the rest of the board. For $100 you really are getting quite a lot. Especially if you package this up with one of the low cost tri-core CPUs that AMD has out, these two with some good cooling and a large HDD you have a great HTPC without spending a ton of cash.
If this is the direction you are going then you should definitely take a look at the GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H

Pros:
Hybrid Graphics support
HDMI out
BluRay Lossless Audio
Low cost
Great Video and Audio playback

Cons:
Horrible DX10 support
Poor gaming performance

Discuss this review here

Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank Angela Lan at GIGABYTE her help in arranging this review.