Gigabyte 8GPXNP Duo Revisited - New BIOS, Better Performance

Introduction

We here at TweakTown have been very lucky to work with many computer companies over the past half a decade or more for our hardware reviews as well as in a technical role.

When we first published our results in our Intel I925 and I915 Mega Roundup article, we had some serious issues with the Gigabyte 8GPXNP Duo (Intel 915 chipset for Pentium 4 processors) motherboard. When we first tested the board, Gigabyte supplied what was to become the retail BIOS onboard as well as a BETA BIOS for evaluation - both BIOS versions proved to be somewhat problematic.

BIOS version known as M2 allows for a somewhat possible overclock, however, no divider rations were provided, voltage control was somewhat limited and it also refused to detect our Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz CPU. When swapping over to the retail version F2 BIOS things went from bad to worse. F2 BIOS would not allow you to select a FSB above 205MHz, or the system would simply fail to post, C.I.A.2 control would not work, as setting it to enable would also cause a POST failure. To top this all off, the performance of the BIOS was also less than stellar.

We have been working with Gigabyte for some time now on this issue and they have come up with a new BIOS version to fix some of the problems we encountered with the original release. Today we are going to revisit the Gigabyte 8GPNXPD Duo motherboard with the new D3 BIOS to see what has been improved and what still needs some work.