Testing

All right then. Now that we've been formally introduced to this board and can see what it has to offer, let's take a look at how well it performs. The test system consists of:

AMD Thunderbird 1000 @ 1333MHz (AVIA)

512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR

Prolink GeForce3

Western Digital 20GB Caviar Hard Drive

I used Windows XP Professional as the OS, and had updated drivers for both the board chipset and the video card. For testing, I used SiSoft Sandra 2001te, Quake III Arena, and MadOnion's 3dMark2001. For comparison sake, I also ran the same tests on an EPoX 8KHA+ board so that we could see how it fares against one of the leaders in the class. Also of note is that both motherboards were tested on a fresh install of Windows without tweaks to the system. We're going for overall board performance, so tweaks were not allowed.

- SiSoft Sandra CPU Benchmark

- SiSoft Sandra Multimedia Benchmark

- SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark

- 3dMark 2001 (Default Settings)

- Quake III Arena (Demo 001)

As we can see from the tests run, the Gigabyte board came solidly in second place on every test used. But if we take into consideration the fact that the EPoX board is one of the best currently available, then we can focus on the fact that the numbers were still far above the figures that are put out by competing chipsets.

I would also like to point out that I have used a lot of motherboards and the stability of this one is truly superb. I tried nearly every trick in the book and couldn't get a hardware induced crash at all. The closest that I got was an nVidia loop when running certain drivers and the 3dMark2001 benchmark, but this is already being attributed to driver incompatibilities and not hardware problems. It's a very pleasant change of pace to have a relatively new chipset and not have a whole slew of problems.