Product Listing

Gigabyte GA-G1975X (Intel 975X Express)

By Zachary Chan - 9 Jan 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

As the GA-G1975X carries a new chipset, we thought it was best to have it compete against the best enthusiast chipsets available for the LGA775 platform at the moment. This would include Gigabyte's own GA-8I955X Royal and GA-8N-SLI Royal motherboards, each based on the Intel 955X Express and nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipsets respectively. As usual, our benchmarks will make use of identical hardware components for all three testbeds with the only difference in driver software. The benchmarking configuration is listed below:-

  • Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor 3.46GHz (1066MHz FSB)
  • 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR2-667 @ 10-4-4 CAS 4.0
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT 128MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 71.84
  • Intel INF 7.2.2.1006 and ICH7R AHCI 5.0.0.1032 driver set (Gigabyte GA-G1975X only)
  • Intel INF 7.0.0.1019 and ICH7R AHCI 5.0.0.1032 driver set (Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal only)
  • NVIDIA nForce4 7.02 chipset driver package (Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal only)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

As mentioned before, the Gigabyte GA-G1975X comes pre-overclocked to 274MHz FSB. Since Gigabyte has confirmed that the board will in fact ship with this clock speeds, we will perform our benchmarks based on it. Of course, we also scaled down the FSB to the regular 266MHz in order to gauge the actual performance of the board if it had a standard FSB speed.


CrossFire Testing

Besides ATI's reference Radeon Xpress 200P CrossFire Edition motherboards, we've only so far tested dual graphics chipset modifications that support ATI CrossFire. Intel's 975X Express represents the second mass marketed chipset to have native CrossFire support and you didn't think we'd miss the chance to give it a run did you?. For those familiar with our previous CrossFire motherboard reviews, the rules are simple. We test the board based on its CrossFire capabilities and the percentage of gain CrossFire gives us on the particular chipset. Because of platform and processor class differences, this is not a CrossFire performance shootout with the other boards, though we do include their scores as a general gauge. Note that the ATI Radeon Xpress 200P reference board is running on an AMD platform and the ASRock 775i915P-SATA2 is based on an Intel 915P Express chipset (this board was recently reviewed and you can view it here ). For our CrossFire testing, the graphics cards will be swapped with two ATI Radeon X850 XTs (one of them being the CrossFire Edition of course).


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be run to test the performance of the GA-G1975X:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark04
  • SPECviewperf 8.01
  • Futuremark 3DMark03
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • AquaMark3
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