Pro, Ultra and now we have a new term "Royal". The Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal deserves it as it is one of the most exciting package I have ever come across. In fact, among the manufacturers we have come across, Gigabyte implements some of the most exciting technology onto their boards. With the i955X chipset, it brings the board to another level with Dolby certified audio and Highly advanced Intel® Matrix Storage technology allows RAID 0 (Striping), RAID 1 (Mirroring), RAID 0+1 (Striping and Mirroring), and RAID 5 (Parity RAID). With the on board 2 additional SATA ports, you get another RAID 0/1 array. That is not the usual high end desktop board we are talking about. In fact, this board is more like an entry level workstation board, I would say. The Universal Plus Dual Power System (U-Plus D.P.S.) that not only helps to extend the lifespan of power modules by keeping them cooler, but also increases overall system reliability by being able to continue to operate even when one transistor has blown. This allows you to continue working on your PC without fail.

Not only does it excel in the "workstation class" category, it also caters to the DV users with the inclusion of IEEE 1394b and USB 2.0. The bluetooth dongle GN-BTD02 which we reviewed before comes with the package, handy just for file, ringtone transfers for the savvy mobile users.  

We test run the board with performance tests benchmarks and found that the board runs very well under 64 bits environment. Using the Intel 820D with Dual Core, we managed to be able to outperform a similarly configured 3.6GHz single core P4 system. In fact, in benchmarks that takes advantage of 64 bits and SMP, the board and 2.8GHz even outperform a AMD Opteron 246 system.

If you are those who loves to tweak the board to maximum performance, the GA-8I955X has one of the most extensive BIOS options which you can adjust. Voltage, FSB, ASync memory settings are all available. For those who just wants plain performance, the BIOS allows you to set it to auto overclock based on applications run. This functions comes handy with the CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2 (CIA 2) and Memory Intelligent Booster 2 (MIB 2). In our tests, we overclocked the board to 245 x 14 which gives us 3.43GHz, a 22.5% boost in performance. Memory wise, we managed to run the memory at DDR2-800 but at CAS 5. As it is run in ASync mode, it really doesn't make much sense then to run it in Sync mode or lower latency at DDR2-533. The performance is not much of a difference when we compared CAS 3, DDR2-533 and CAS 5, DDR2-800.

Overall, Gigabyte has developed a good product based on the i955X chipset. It would be good if they can also develop a similar mainboard for the Althon 64.

 

Pricing

Discuss

Pros

• Bluetooth
• 1394b
• 4 SATA ports with RAID 0,1,5,10
• IDE RAID 0/1

Cons

• No Multiplier control
• No Wi-Fi

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.