Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR (GA-8IRXP)

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We used to criticize Gigabyte for not offering features that the enthusiast market desired and unlike most companies, Gigabyte actually changed their approach to product design. They continued to focus on stability and simply added the features that the enthusiast market desired. The end result can be clearly seen in the Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR which is one of the most feature filled motherboards in this roundup.

For starters, the board features 6 PCI slots and three DIMM slots. Even with all three DIMM slots populated and the memory set to DDR266 the board ran just as stable as ever during our tests. But those are rather rudimentary features when you look at the rest of what the 8IRXP offers.

The P4 Titan DDR's BIOS is the basic Award setup with manually configurable FSB frequencies as well as core, AGP and DRAM voltages. All of the options offered are perfect for the casual overclocker as well as the hard-core tweaker as you can deliver more voltage to the AGP slot and your memory to push them even further. However the P4 Titan DDR is naturally a very solid motherboard so if you're not into overclocking, the features will go unused while the stability remains.

Just like the FIC's VC15, Gigabyte outfitted the P4 Titan DDR with an onboard 10/100 ethernet controller. But instead of using a Realtek controller they implemented an Intel 82562ET physical layer which should offer a bit more long term reliability than the Realtek controller in the VC15.

The onboard audio is driven by the Sigmatel 9708T AC'97 codec in addition to the Creative Labs CT5880 DSP. The DSP can be disabled in the BIOS which will leave you with simply the AC'97 codec. Unfortunately the onboard audio is still limited to basic 2-channel audio with the use of the DSP being to offload some of the processing from the CPU but with a 2GHz Pentium 4 it's really not necessary. The output quality of the Sigmatel codec is just fine and competitive with the Avance Logic solutions we've seen in other motherboards. We question the need for the Creative Labs DSP as it seems like it's present more for name recognition than actual usefulness.

Gigabyte offers two USB 2.0 headers on the P4 Titan DDR that are driven by the popular NEC controller. Unlike most other manufacturers Gigabyte offers additional USB ports in the form of 2 USB 1.0 ports and 4 USB 2.0 ports (they also work with 1.0 device) through brackets that can be mounted at the rear of your case.

The feature list doesn't stop there as Gigabyte also placed a Promise IDE RAID controller on the board as well. The Promise controller supports RAID 0 and 1 as well as the ATA-133 spec but it's unfortunately limited by its BIOS setup utility. The setup does not allow you to manually configure an array with user selectable stripe sizes, instead it gives you the option of selecting one of three profiles (Desktop, Server, A/V). In theory, each one of those profiles should offer a different stripe size according to the needs of the particular application, yet they all default to 64KB. A 64KB stripe size isn't bad but we would rather see a user configurable RAID setup with profiles as well as selectable stripe sizes greater and less than 64KB. Maybe that's asking too much as Gigabyte is at the mercy of Promise in this case but they should either push for the support or start looking for another supplier.

The final feature of the P4 Titan DDR is Gigabyte's Dual BIOS which has been around for quite a while now. The technology is simple and doesn't cost much to implement; there are two BIOS chips placed on the motherboard and should one fail or be the victim of an improper flash, the second one can be used as a recovery tool.

The P4 Titan DDR is Gigabyte's best effort yet and we highly commend them on a job well done.