Review: Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 Pro - Mainboard - HEXUS.net

System Setup and Notes

Hardware

Motherboards

Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 Pro, VIA K8T800, Socket 754. AGP8X, DDR
ABIT KV8 Pro, VIA K8T800 Pro, Socket 754, AGP 8x, DDR
EPoX 8KDA3+, NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb, Socket 754, AGP 8x, DDR
ECS KV2 Extreme, VIA K8T800 Pro, Socket 939. AGP8X, DDR

Processors

AMD Athlon 64 3400+, Socket 754, 512KB L2
AMD Athlon FX-53, Socket 938, 1MB L2

Graphics Cards

Leadtek GeForce 6800GT, 256MB

Memory

512MB (1 x 512MB) Corsair XMS3200LLPT DDR-I PC-3200 - 2-2-2-6 (KV2)
512MB (2x256MB) Corsair XMS3500C2 DDR-I PC-3200 - 2-2-2-6 (8KDA3+, KV8)
512MB (1 x 512MB) Corsair XMS3500 DDR-I PC-3200 - 2-3-2-6 (K8VT800)

Hard Disks

1 x 36.6GB Western Digital Raptor SATA

Software

Windows XP Professional w/ SP2
NVIDIA nForce3 Platform Driver
VIA Hyperion 4.51v
NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77
DirectX 9.0c End User Runtime

HEXUS Pifast
Sciencemark 2.0
KribiBench v1.1
LAME 3.92MMX encoding U2's Pop album at 192CBR
Realstorm Raytracing Benchmark
3DMark 2001SE
3DMark03
Painkiller

Notes

For testing, we'll be putting Gigabyte's offering up against a VIA K8T800 Pro board, in the form of ABITs KV8 Pro, as well as an nForce3 250Gb-based EpoX 8KDA3+. We'll be using the usual suite of tests to analysis the RAM, CPU and graphical capabilities of the board. As you can see from the memory section above, we were unable to reach the optimum 2-2-2-6 memory timings achievable on the other two boards with our K8VT800 - Instead, we were only capable of running stably at 2-3-2-6, running with RAS to CAS delay set at the preferred setting of 2 caused major instability and the inability to boot into Windows.

One other issue of note here is that, due to the transition to the use of a GeForce 6800GT for testing for our current reviews, this means that there are no directly comparative numbers for the three graphical tests (3DMark 2001, 3DMark03 and Painkiller) in our suite with those two motherboards - Instead, we have taken some numbers using an Athlon FX-53 and 6800GT running on an ECS KV2 Extreme motherboard, if nothing else to help show what the performance jump from a single-channel 3400+ processor is.