Gigabyte GA-945G-S3 (i945G) Core 2 Duo Mainboard Benchmarks 10/10
Bluetooth 14 Nov 2006

Pricing of GA-965P-DS3 >>>

Gigabyte GA-945G-S3 is a mid range board for the budget conscious users who wants the speed of the Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme processor. Although it might not have the bells and whistles of the more expensive GA-965P-DQ6, it does have very impressive performance, at least that is from what we tested based on the F1 version of the retail board and BIOS.

The GA-945G-S3 uses the older Intel 945G integrated video chipset. It supports the 533/800/1066MHZ FSB Pentium D/ Pentium 4 and the new Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo processor running 1066MHz FSB. The board comes with a GbE and 7.1 HD Audio. 4 DDR2 DIMM slots supports up to 4GB of DDR2/400/533/667 memory. The board comes with 4 SATAII ports 1 PCIe x16 and 3 PCIe x1 + 3 PCI slots for exapansion capabilities.

In terms of features, it dose have the 8 ch audio, GbE and a super optimised BIOS for overclocking. The BIOS is very complete and the voltage range is quite a shocker. In fact, the FSB range goes from 200 ~ 600MHz, that is really what I would never expect from a 945G board. (BIOS gallery here). With the X6800 ES CPU, we can lower the multiplier and increase the FSB and run the RAM at ASYNC mode.

With the X6800, the FSB is raised to 375MHz x 6, RAM is set to run at ASyncm system memroy multiplier is set to 1.50, When CPU Freq is set to 375MHz, Memory Freq is 563MHz. In the test, DIMM voltage is set to +0.1v, PCIe Overvoltage is set to +0.1v and FSB Overvoltage is set to +0.1v. CPU Voltage Control is 1.35v.

Something interesting to note is that if the PCI Express Frequency is set to SYNC or ASYNC, the sytsem won't BOOT even at 300MHz. To go beyond 300MHz, PCI Express Frequency is set to AUTO.

With the same CPU, we pushed for higher CPU Frequency, the system can POST up to 397MHz. Setting the CPU Frequency beyond 400 POSTs but the CPU-Z still shows 397MHz. Looks like the BIOS limits it to within 400MHz.

When multiplier is set to default 11x (X6800), we raise the CPU Frequency and it can POST up to 360MHz. The system is stable at around 330 x 11.

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Pros

• Overclocking options
• IDE channel

Cons

• no WiFi
• No 1394
• no eSATA II

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

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