Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4

Verdict:

[+] P45

Good BIOS features; affordable; diagnostic LEDs

[-] A P45

Poor game performance; especially when overclocked; only one PCI slot

The Intel P45 chipset will probably be the last of the LGA775 chipsets - everything Intel produces from this point on will be based on the new LGA1366 socket for Nehalem CPUs. With that in mind, every motherboard manufacturer is keen to make its P45 motherboard range the best that it can be. If you have a good CPU or are building a PC from scratch, and just can't wait until Nehalem is launched, a P45 motherboard should be an obvious purchase, but which one?

Costing £111, the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 is much cheaper than other P45 boards such as the Asus Maximus II Formula. However, Gigabyte has a knack of making well-featured boards that overclock well for not much cash, and we expected this board to follow suit.

LAYOUT

The board is pretty spartan - only the High Velocity 2x Bandwidth Boost (which teams the two Gigabit LAN ports) could be considered a gimmick. Other additions such as the power, reset and CMOS clearing buttons are useful, while the various LEDs scattered around the board are also handy.

Some of these LEDs are warning lights that inform you if a component is faulty, while a row of green, yellow and red LEDs shows how hard your VRMs are working at any given time. As there's an 'E' in the name, this board also has Gigabyte's DES power-saving VRM technology.

The board has a low-profile heatsink on the Southbridge, and there are also neat Northbridge and VRM heatsinks.

EXPANSION SLOTS

While there are three PCI-E 2.0 slots for graphics cards, one of these has only four lanes of bandwidth - CrossFire setups should use a maximum of two cards with this board. With two cards, each will have 8x PCI-E 2.0 lanes. With two dual-slot cards installed, one of the three PCI-E slots and the only PCI slot will be obscured.

With a single dual-slot card, the PCI slot is readily accessible and a good distance away from your hot graphics card cooler. There are five 4-pin fan headers on the board too, all of which are easy to access.

THE BIOS

The BIOS for the GA-EP45-DS4 is, like many we've seen for P45 boards, advanced and detailed. There are several neat touches; for instance, the board set our memory to run at 1,066MHz by default, unlike other boards that seem to regard 800MHz as the maximum frequency for DDR2.

We were also pleased with the tiny increments of voltage control for the CPU, RAM and Northbridge. This not only implies that the voltage regulators for each component are high-quality, but it also provides greater ability to fine-tune an overclock.

The BIOS presents the stock voltages of the components in one column, and the additional voltage or clock speed that you've added in a second column, which is a very easy system to use.

Gigabyte has also used its dual BIOS technology to good effect - on startup, you can press an F-key to restore a safe BIOS after you've gone too far with an overclock. Hitting another F-key lets you flash a new BIOS onto the board from a USB flash drive without having to mess around with DOS or a Windows BIOS flashing tool.

PERFORMANCE

The GA-EP45-DS4 was fairly fast at its stock speeds, returning a score of 985 in the Gimp test, 998 in the Handbrake test and 818 in multitasking. We wanted more from the board, though, so we set about overclocking it.

OVERCLOCKING

This proved to be easy - we only had to increase the voltage of the CPU to the usual 1.525V, and the FSB to 458MHz, and then lower the memory divider to bring the RAM back down to around its rated 1,066MHz to achieve a stable 3.66GHz system. We raised the Northbridge voltage a notch to help.

The overclocked scores were also very good, providing around a 30 per cent boost in both the Gimp and Handbrake tests. However, we saw only a 6 per cent rise in the multitasking test, as this is less CPU-dependent. Dropping the multiplier, we coaxed the board to a maximum FSB of 490MHz, which is good, but not great.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

While the Media Benchmarks tests ran smoothly, we encountered some strangeness when playing Crysis. At stock speeds, the minimum of 15fps and average of 29fps are a touch slow, and applying the overclock saw the frame rate plummet.

We tried adding extra voltage to the Northbridge, RAM and CPU, and tinkering with the other settings, but to no avail. An early BIOS could be to blame, but there's no way to be sure.

CONCLUSION

The Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 is mostly well designed, with an accessible and comprehensive BIOS. However, there's only one PCI slot, which will be obscured if you use a second dual-slot graphics card.

While overclocking the board was easy and resulted in a good performance boost, the maximum FSB isn't as high as we hoped it would be, which seems to be an issue with the P45 chipset. The poor Crysis benchmarks show that Gigabyte has some work to do with the BIOS too. If you have £100 to spare for a new motherboard then the Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP is still the board to buy.

You can buy the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 from Scan Computers for £111.97 inc VAT (price correct at time of review)

For more information on the GA-EP45-DS4, visiti Gigabyte's website

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition - Processors
• Shuttle XPC SX48P2 Deluxe - Desktop PCs
• SilverStone Raven - Peripherals
• Raptor Gaming M3 Platinum - Peripherals
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 - Processors
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Graphics cards
• DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS - Motherboards