Gigabyte EP45-T Extreme Review & Overclocking - PAGE 1

William Henning - Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 Like Share

Today we are looking at Gigabyte's EP45-T Extreme motherboard.

This is one of their high end motherboards, and it shows it. The packaging is pretty fancy, and even has a carrying handle!

Gigabyte is not shy about letting you know of all of its features right on the packaging:

Energy savings with "DES Advanced hardware based Dynamic 6-Gear switching"
supports 1600MHz FSB
supports up to DDR3 1900 (dual channel)
12 virtual power phases
2 power phases for memory
2 power phases for north bridge
2 PCIe 2.0 16x slots
1 PCIe 4x electrical / 16x mechanical slot for 3 way CrossFireX
All copper Heat pipe / Heat sink connecting NB and SB and MOSFET's
on-board debug LED
OverVolt alert
OverClock alert
dual Gigabit Ethernet with Teaming
DualBIOS
on-board buttons for Power/Reset/CLRCMOS
106dB SNR ALC889A HD audio

It is one NICE looking board - but the question is, how well will it perform? How well will it overclock?

Here are the full specs, straight from Gigabyte's site:

CPU	Support for an Intel^® Core™ 2 Extreme processor/ Intel^® Core™ 2 Quad processor/Intel^® Core™ 2 Duo processor/ Intel^® Pentium^® Dual-Core processor/Intel^® Celeron^® processor in the LGA 775 package (Note) This motherboard is designed with VRD11.1 power phase, and cannot be compatible with VRD10 designed CPU. Please refer to "CPU Support List" for details. L2 cache varies with CPU
Front Side Bus	1600/1333/1066/800 MHz FSB
Chipset	North Bridge: Intel^® P45 Express Chipset South Bridge: Intel^® ICH10R
Memory	4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory Dual channel memory architecture Support for DDR3 1900 (O.C.)/1600/1333/1066/800 MHz memory modules (Refer to Memory support list for more information)
Audio	Realtek ALC889A codec High Definition Audio 2/4/5.1/7.1-channel Support for Dolby Home Theater Support for S/PDIF In/Out Support for CD In
LAN	2 x Realtek 8111C chips (10/100/1000 Mbit) Support for Teaming
Expansion Slots	1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (The PCIEx16 and PCIEx8 slots support ATI CrossFireX technology and conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.) 1 x PCI Express x4 slots 1 x PCI Express x1 slot 3 x PCI slots
Storage Interface	South Bridge: 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATAII0, SATAII1, SATAII2, SATAII3, SATAII4, SATAII5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 iTE IT8213 chip: 1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices iTE IT8720 chip: 1 x floppy disk drive connector supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive
IEEE 1394a	T.I. TSB43AB23 chip Up to 3 IEEE 1394a ports (via the IEEE 1394a brackets connected to the internal IEEE 1394a headers)
USB	Integrated in the South Bridge Up to 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 on the back panel, 4 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers)
Internal I/O Connectors	1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector 1 x floppy disk drive connector 1 x IDE connector 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors 1 x CPU fan header 2 x system fan headers 1 x power fan header 1 x front panel header 1 x front panel audio header 1 x CD In connector 1 x S/PDIF In header 1 x S/PDIF Out header 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers 3 x IEEE 1394a headers 1 x serial port header 1 x chassis intrusion header 1 x power LED header 1 x power switch 1 x reset switch
Back Panel Connectors	1 x PS/2 keyboard port 1 x PS/2 mouse port 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector 1 x coaxial S/PDIF Out connector 1 x clearing CMOS switch 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 2 x RJ-45 ports 6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone)
I/O Controller	iTE IT8720 chip
H/W Monitoring	System voltage detection CPU/System temperature detection CPU/System/Power fan speed detection CPU overheating warning CPU/System/Power fan fail warning CPU/System fan speed control
BIOS	2 x 8 Mbit flash Use of licensed AWARD BIOS Support for DualBIOS™ PnP 1.0a, DMI 2.0, SM BIOS 2.4, ACPI 1.0b
Unique Features	Support for @BIOS Support for Q-Flash Support for Virtual Dual BIOS Support for Download Center Support for Xpress Install Support for Xpress Recovery2 Support for EasyTune Support for Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced Support for Time Repair Support for Q-Share
Bundle Software	Norton Internet Security (OEM version)
Operating System	Support for Microsoft/ Windows/ Vista/XP
Form Factor	ATX Form Factor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm

next: The Board »

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Article Index

1.	Introduction
2.	The Board
3.	The BIOS
4.	More BIOS
5.	Test Setup & Benchmarks Used
6.	Business Winstone & Content Creation
7.	WinRAR & HDTach
8.	LAME MP3 & TMPGEnc
9.	Call of Duty & Commanche 4
10.	Doom 3 & Quake 4
11.	Halo, Jedi Knight & UT4K
12.	Sandra
13.	RightMark Read & Write
14.	RightMark Latency & Bandwidth
15.	Overclocking, Power Consumption & Conclusion

Comments

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werz51 Oct 26, 08

I'm a gigabyte fan, at the moment I'm running a GA-P35-DS3R M/B, with a Q6600 cpu. Which is about 18mths old, which I'm still happy with.
So I'm familiarizing myself with with the newer chipsets.
I only mildly overclock my computers, being more interested in quietness and reliability.
I'm not convinced there's enough difference between the two chipsets to make it worth upgrading to the EP45 in the next couple of months. I think I'd be better getting another year from my present computer, and upgrade when I see what the new intel CPU line performs like.
The review didn't make me think the increase in performance would justify the expense.

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