Review: Gigabyte 8IPE775-G 'Springdale' Motherboard - Mainboard - HEXUS.net

System setup and notes

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.

Gigabyte 8IPE775-G 'Springdale motherboard (F3 BIOS)
DFI LANPARTY 925X-T2 i925X motherboard
ASUS A8V Deluxe S939 VIA K8T800 Pro motherboard
ABIT IC7-G i875P Canterwood motherboard

Other components

Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (3.6GHz Prescott, LGA775, 1MB L2 cache )
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Northwood CPU (S478, 512kb L2 cache)
AMD Athlon 64 Model 3500+ CPU (2.2GHz, 512kb L2 cache)
AMD Athlon 64 Model 3800+ CPU (2.4GHz, 512kb L2 cache)
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB, AGP, 350/1000
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB, PCI Express, 350/1000
1GB (2x512MB) OCZ Platinum Rev2 , run at 2-2-2-5
1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2 4300 DDR2, run at 4-4-4-12
Pioneer 105 DVD-RW
Western Digital 160GB (WD1600) 8MB cache hard drive
Dell P991 19" monitor

Software

Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0b runtime
Intel 6.0.1.1006 chipset drivers
Intel Application Accelerator for ICH6
VIA Hyperion 4.51 driver set
NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77 driver set
Pifast v4.1 to 10m places
Lame v3.92 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album (611MB)
HEXUS XviD encoding test
KribiBench 1.1
ScienceMark 2.0
Realstorm Raytracing Benchmark 2004 - 512x384x32
3DMark 2001SE v330
UT2003 Retail (Build 2225)
Comanche 4 benchmark
DOOM3 - Timedemo 1

Notes

I'll be comparing Gigabyte's hybrid board against a full i925X DFI LANPARTY motherboard that's running a PCIe GeForce 6800 GT and DDR2 memory. I'll also be looking at how a Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) compares against a 3.4GHz Northwood run on a tuned Canterwood motherboard. Additionally, we'll see how Intel's platforms compare against a couple of AMD's current finest.

No problems to report during testing. Benchmarks were carried out at 1024x768x32 85Hz unless otherwise stated.