Reviews - Pro-Clockers! PC Reviews One MegaHertz At A Time

Introduction

Just recently we got the chance to take a close up look at Gigabyte's latest motherboard the EP45-DQ6 at their overclocking competition last month. Visually the board looked as if it has all the cooling any overclocker would want when trying to get maximum megahertz. And because the board was based on Intel's latest chipset, the P45 I knew at that point I was going to review this board. Even though Gigabyte gave the competitors at the competition a chance to play with the board I was not lucky enough to stay for the results of the board due to some pre-wedding appointments. But the want of wanting this board on my test bench was not diminished by any means.

From the very beginning many of us could have figured the P45 chipset was going to be the chipset of chance as it is price considerably cheaper than the older X38 and the X48. And from the early reviews the P45 overclockers pretty well. We have seen able forum post and web reviews with front side buses reaching the 600MHz range on Core2Duo processors. But for the non-overclockers out there another advantage over the older P35 is the two 8x PCIe slots when attempting to using ATI video cards in Crossfire mode. Today, we will take the EP45-DQ6 through a ring of benchmarks and see what type of FSB numbers we can achieve.

Packaging

Gigabyte's higher-end motherboards travel pretty well. We have seen them comes in a very shiny and pimped out gold box like in the case of the X48-DQ6. The EP45-DQ6 comes in the same type of box but blue. I like this approach alot better than the other. The front idolizes the Dynamic Energy Saver or D.E.S. feature that when activated helps to reduce that high electricity bill by running in a more efficient mode. The rear of the box has about every specification about the EP45-DQ6 imaginable.

Specifications

Features

• Revolution energy saving design with DES Advanced featuring hardware based Dynamic 6-Gear switching
• Supports 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 multi-core processors with FSB 1600 MHz
• Advanced power phase design with virtual 12 power phases to provides highly efficient operation for 45nm CPU
• Dual channel DDR2 1200 for remarkable system performance
• Embedded 2 power phases for NB chipset and memory power to excel at power efficiency
• 2 PCI-E 2.0 x16 graphic interface plus 2 PCI-E x4 with CrossFireX™ support for ultimate graphics performance
• Built-in TPM chip with 2048bits encryption to highest level digital data protection
• Smart Backup provides data backup solution with 4 serial ATA device attachment from 2 hardware RAID chip
• Diagnostic LED and ACPI LEDs on board to display system and power status
• 4 Gigabit Ethernet LAN with Teaming functionality
• Supports Dolby Home Theater® audio to create a stunning surround sound listening experience.
• Quad BIOS solution gives a multiple security to the system
• Power/reset/Clr CMOS onboard button for easily operation on the workbench
• Hardware Overvoltage Control IC Provides more voltage control options on CPU, North bridge and memory
• Blu-ray playback outputs supported by high quality 106dB SNR ALC889A HD audio

Closer looks

Visually, this board isn't too bad looking. The teal PCB with various yellow, orange, green and red slots and plugs very appealing without over doing it. Gigabyte did a real good job with the heat sinks as they are not as tall as what we have seen from MSI. But we haven't gotten our mitts on the Extreme version of this board yet. All the heat sinks are connected to one another via heat pipes. The six heat sinks covers power regulators around the CPU socket and then travels to the North Bridge and ends just south of that.

The heat sinks around the CPU socket are pretty hefty but in no way interfere with the mounting of our Thermalright Ultra-120. And believe it or not even with the heatsinks in place I was able to get to the push pins of the mounting bracket of the cooler without any problem. Between the DIMM slots and the ATX plug are a set of LED lights that indicates the different level of power. Surrounding the socket are twelve power mosfets for VRD 11.1 support.

The EP45-DQ6 supports three different forms of PCI standards: two 16x/8x, two 4x PCIe slot with two standard PCI slots available to anyone running cards in that legacy slot. The two 1x slots are located between the two larger ones. This is a bad thing if you tend to run Crossfire in any form but great as there is plenty of space for air circulation keeping the top card from starving for fresh air. The board has many headers for firewire and USB for a total of 5. But what we have to comment on is the power, Clear CMOS and reset switches underneath the last slot. This is the beginning of a great benching board.

The SATA ports are all located on the outskirts of the board. Some are faced upward while the others are facing out. This is a smooth convenience for someone that is into cable managing. The ports support Raid configurations of 0, 1, 5 and 10. The lone IDE connector is just below the SATA ports. Honestly, I wouldn't miss it much if Gigabyte ever decides to eliminate. Also in the image below you can see the two regulators that support the DIMM slots to aid in the efficiency of the memory banks.

When it comes to features the EP45 has plenty of them but one that stands out in my mind is the number of Gigabit LAN ports. Try four on this motherboard. Gigabyte gives numerous reasons for giving the user these many LAN ports but the one that made me smile is the ability to adjust power consumption according to cable length. So, basically if your system is really close to your router or switch the less power it would use. But is the LAN cable is longer more power is used to lessen packet interruptions.

Gigabyte still includes the Dynamic Energy Saver or D.E.S. software and LED lights they we took a look at in the EP35-DS4 review. But the main difference between this one included with the EP45 and the EP35 is now you can set the application to run constantly and never have to worry about shutting it off when you want to run in full power mode like in a heavy benching session. So the user can still adjust voltages and overclock without having to worry about the D.E.S. limiting them.

BIOS

The BIOS on this board far excess the one we saw on the Asrock P45R2000 WiFi. The Gigabyte gives you several more voltage, timings and PLL options compared to Asrock but we are talking about two motherboards that are in two different place ranges. Previous Gigabyte BIOS has gotten our test Core2Duo E8400 to well over 4GHz.

CPU Ratio: 6x to default
CPU Host Frequency: 100-1200MHz
PCI Frequency: 90-150MHz
GMCH: 200, 266, 333, 400
CPU Straps: 200, 266, 333, 400
CPU VCore: 0.50 - 2.30v
CPU Termination: 0.80 - 1.94v
CPU PLL: 1.10 - 2.80v
CPU Ref: 0.44 - 1.00v
CPU Ref 2: 0.44 - 1.00v
MCH Core: 0.80 - 1.80v
MCH REF: 0.50 - 1.045v
MCH/DRAM: 0.44 - 1.70v
ICH I/O: 1.00 - 2.30v
DRAM Voltage: 1.8 - 3.00v
DRAM Term: 0.62 - 1.325v
Chan A: 0.62 - 0.44 - 1.70v
Chan B: 0.62 - 0.44 - 1.70v

Testing

Before we did any testing we wanted to show you how the EP45-DQ6 detected our E8400.

Testing Hardware:
Intel Core2Duo E8400
DDR2 Crucial Ballistix PC6400 (4-4-4-12)
Maxtor 100GB SATAI
Sapphire Ultimate 3870
Thermalright Ultra 120
Thermaltake TP1000

Testing Software:
Futuremark PCMark05
Futuremark 3DMark06
SiSoftware Sandra
Everest Ultimate
SuperPi 1.5 mod
Prey
F.E.A.R.

Competition:
Asrock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ (DDR2) + Leadtek 6800GT
Asrock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ (DDR3) + Leadtek 6800GT
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 + Leadtek 6800GT
Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4 + Leadtek 6800GT
Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 + Leadtek 6800GT
Asrock X48TurboTwins-WiFi+ (DDR2) + Sapphire Ultimate 3870
Asrock X48TurboTwins-WiFi+ (DDR3) + Sapphire Ultimate 3870

Results

CPU results

Futuremark PCmark05 Build 1.1.0
PCMark05 is everything you need to reliably and easily measure the performance of your PC and determine its strengths and weaknesses. With PCMark05, you will be able to select the optimal upgrades for your existing PC, or choose the right new PC that fits your specific needs. This easy-to-use product gives you the same tools and knowledge that virtually every professional tester in the industry uses.

Super PI Modded 1.5
In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi in collaboration with Dr. Y.Kanada at the computer center. This record should be the current world record. (Details are shown in the windows help.) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with a Pentium 90 MHz, 40 MB main memory and 340 MB available storage.

Ram results

Futuremark PCmark05 Build 1.1.0
PCMark05 is everything you need to reliably and easily measure the performance of your PC and determine its strengths and weaknesses. With PCMark05, you will be able to select the optimal upgrades for your existing PC, or choose the right new PC that fits your specific needs. This easy-to-use product gives you the same tools and knowledge that virtually every professional tester in the industry uses.

SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2007 SP1
SiSoftware has announced the availability of Service Release 2 (SR2) for SiSoftware Sandra 2005, the latest version of its award-winning utility. The focus of this service release has been improved support, compatibility and reliability rather than new features. We have been working closely with more hardware vendors than before to be able to bring greater direct support of an increased market share of commodity and server technologies.

Lavalys Everest
Lavalys EVEREST Home Edition is freeware system information, system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for home PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. It offers the world's most accurate system information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information. EVEREST Home Edition is uniquely available for home users without any charges, based on the freeware license.

HDD results

Futuremark PCmark05 Build 1.1.0
PCMark05 is everything you need to reliably and easily measure the performance of your PC and determine its strengths and weaknesses. With PCMark05, you will be able to select the optimal upgrades for your existing PC, or choose the right new PC that fits your specific needs. This easy-to-use product gives you the same tools and knowledge that virtually every professional tester in the industry uses.

Simpli Software HD Tach 3
HD Tach will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer specs, analyze your system for proper performance, and compare your performance with others. HD Tach is very easy to use, quick, and presents data in easy to read graphs, including the ability to compare two storage devices on screen at the same time for easy analysis.

Video and Gaming results

Futuremark 3DMark06 Build 1.0.2
3DMark06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking. A fundamental tool for every company in the PC industry as well as PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today. Futuremark's exclusive Online ResultBrowser web service tracks and compares 3DMark06 scores.

Sierra F.E.A.R. Update 1.08
F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon) is an intense combat experience with rich atmosphere and a deeply intense paranormal storyline presented entirely in first person. Be the hero in your own spine-tingling epic of action, tension, and terror and discover the true meaning of F.E.A.R.

3drealms Prey
PREY takes full advantage of the Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card. PREY supports OpenAL hardware acceleration, EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 features of 4 reverberation effects at once, and uses Sound Blaster� X-Fi� XRAM feature to load audio samples on the cards with 64 megs of RAM.

Power Consumption

We started the testing with a WattsUp Pro meter to measure watts use by the components listed above. And we used a standard digital multimeter to measure the rails of the power supply. To implement a load on the system, we ran Futuremark 3DMark06 at the highest settings with SuperPi and OCCT running in the background.

Overclocking

Overclocking the EP45-DQ6 requires a good knowledge of voltage limits and of PLLs. The latter of the two is something that I am still working on. So, if you plan on purchasing a board based on this P45 chipset we recommend doing some research and taking the time to learning all you can. We also recommend some form of active cooling blowing over the North Bridge as well. And when overclocking Pro-Clockers states you are doing this at your own risk and no bad accordances are fault of us.

We like to test the overclocking able of a board by achieving the max FSB at the stock CPU ratio. And with this board and out E8400 we were able to get it up to 475MHz for a total core speed of 4275. This got us right up there with the EP35 and close to what the X48-DQ6 did for us. We were more than happy with the outcome. With time and better BIOS we should see better numbers in the future.

Note (Added 7-22-08): As promised I said I would revisit this board after finding some tweaks and this is what I have done. After some playful tweaking of the BIOS namely the CPU Clock rates I was able to hit a ceiling of 600MHz. This is ceiling I believe is due to my Crucial Ballistrix being the bottleneck as they are only rated at 800MHz and I far exceeded that by 400MHz. So our new high is 600FSB on the EX45-DQ6. Very impressive Gigabyte. I will update again after getting better ram.

Conclusion

To begin this conclusion section, The Gigabyte has enough LEDs to light up a case. All the LED lights are very helpful in one form or another. We see that they are helpful in the form of telling the user energy state the system is in, if anything was improperly removed from the board or if the overall health of the motherboard is good or bad. We applaud Gigabyte for doing what it can to make life easier for the end-user no matter if he or she is a extreme bencher or a regular Joe computer user.

In past times it was not possible to mention power saving and overclocking in the same sentence. But with today's motherboards like the EP45-DQ6, we can run in power saving mode and jump into benching status without having to anything. In the case of this board all we have to do is fire up Easy Tune and we are good to go.

But because most of the people that will go out and purchase board are power users we will now get in the benefits that mostly accommodate them. This begins with the BIOS and the EP45-DQ6 has an impressive one like most top-end motherboards. We have the ability to adjust voltages on every component from the CPU to the PLL. Combines with the versatility of fine tuning the ram any good overclocker should we very happy with this motherboard.

Another thing I believe Gigabyte listened to consumers about is onboard switches like power, reset and clear CMOS. And this board has all three. We found them very useful when it came time to find the maximum overclock of this board. This is truly something every highend should have. It didn't matter if we had the board on the open air bench or inside of a case the buttons were very easy to get to which made life very easy for us.

We received the DQ6 version of the EP45 which is next to the higher end Extreme version. There are a few other versions available as well. There is the DS4P, DS3P and the DS3L as well. A quick look on Google Product Search showed a price range between $125 for the DS3L and $275 for the Extreme. Our board retailed for about $250. So overall the motherboards in the P45 series aren't too expensive and will fit in the realm of most people's budget. But for the big dawgs there is also the EP45T for DDR3 memory. Hopefully we can bring you a review on this in the near future.

There are many more features of the EP45-DQ6 we can go on telling you about but we will leave it in the form of Pros and Cons to no longer bored you.

Pros
Cost
Overclocking
Four gigabit LAN ports
Full featured BIOS
LED for various purposes
Power saving features
Quad Crossfire
CMOS, power and reset switches
Cooling
Dual BOIS

Cons
Heat