Thank You Gigabyte!
03.12.08 - 07:21pm
A month back or so I was one of the winners in Gigabyte’s Overclocking Competition. For the last month or so I’ve been communicating with Gigabyte’s Public Relations and just last week I received the first portion of my prize for efforts. A rather large box arrived and shaking it like a Christmas present hinted at a few articles bouncing around inside. This box had the check for $2,000, a very nice Omega pen with Gigabyte on it, a CD case, and a spiffy light jacket with Gigabyte on it. Unfortunately my X48-DQ6 was delayed till April but on the flip side I have a few more surprises up my sleeve and the X48-DQ6 was bumped up to an X48T-DQ6. Looks like I’ll be DDR3 shopping sooner than expected, no problem though with so much on the market now. I had a great time with this competition and I hope this is the beginning of a great relationship. That sounded oh so cheesy, but I do. Below is the prize box along with my first surprise. Thanks Gigabyte!
Nice work dude.
Somewhat less enthralling, but on impluse (rarely a good thing) I just purchased a new gigabyte m-atx board:
http://www.gigabyte.co.nz/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2691&ProductName=GA-73PVM-S2H
(I’m simply upgrading an old 478 m-atx system I have around the house)
I was a little disappointed to discover it offers only single channel memory (up to DDR2-800) so did some browsing on the value of dual channel over single channel in order to decide just how disappointed I should be.
The little information I found on it seems to suggest the difference is very minor (which made me feel a bit better)
I do suspect dual channel offers a lot more theoretical benefit than it does practical, as conditions have to be optimal in order to realise the greater bandwidth potential.
ps. I’ll be pairing it with a 8800gts or 9600gt
In my tests between single-channel vs dual-channel and high frequency vs low frequency I’ve noticed one thing, it doesn’t matter in daily use. I noticed observed differences between single and dual channel, if anything I noticed the huge hit going from 2GB to 1GB more when loading up normal applications ie not Sandra/SuperPi. Frequency and bandwidth is another case where it rarely matters much except for synthetic tests where it might gain you a few percentage points that might add up to 1 FPS. I’d say you’ll be very satisfied with that board but then again I’ve never used the chipset so that’s the pro-gigabyte part in me speaking out. Impulse buys you often regret but seldom don’t enjoy!
Hi Chris,
Well I’m happy to report the board has really met my expectations. It overclocks great, which is something new to me in the m-atx form-factor. It’s definately not a power-users overclocking board, and there is no voltage control for the memory. However, I have the FSB clocked to 333 for my e6700 giving me 3.3ghz with no increase in the vcore required, and the system is running cool and stable. The memory is clocked to 444 giving me a 3:4 ratio.
The only issue I had seemed to be related to the PCI latency delay. The deafult value (32) seemed to be the cause of an occassional lock up when booting into Windows (when overclocked). By increasing it to 64 this stopped happening. Kind of odd, but thought I’d mention it as if anyone else gets this board they might have the same problem and this was what fixed it for me.
I have no doubt I could overclock this board quite a bit more, but there really is no point. It all comes down to the GPU now and I’m waiting on a Gigabyte 8800GTS (320 meg) which I picked up real cheap second hand :-)
Man, I’ve really got a growing pile of old 478/AGP gear I need to start selling off. Some of this stuff was pretty top of the line for that generation (3.4 extreme edition P4 and a gecube x1950xt AGP) and it still holds sentimental value to me even though it ran super hot and gave me nothing but trouble..
I know what you mean about sentimental older hardware. I have my Athlon XP 2400+ sitting here on my desk that I keep as a goodluck charm. It was the first processor I outright purchased that wasn’t part of an OEM machine. I really need to get a frame for it, loved that chip and haven’t had anything besides my Crucial 10th Anniversary sticks that I’ve been attached to. Those sticks are going into a frame when I retire them in a few weeks. Funny how that works out.