Review GB Asus P4G8X

Excuse me if this is one of my first posts.. I have been lurking here about 2 years, but only registered like 6 weeks or so ago, and haven't found a topic to really post on until now...

Hmm I don't know what to make of this review... please excuse me if my thoughts are jumbled.. I just feel a little let down.

I have been waiting for like 2.5 months for this board, as has probably everyone else with a new p4 cpu....

Geeze, lets compare the 845pe chipset to the granite bay in Asus boards:

Pro Granite bay: = fast memory benchmarks, blew the 845 chipsets away, about the same as the rimm chipsets, but then look at the real world numbers.... sigh.. I don't see exactly why I should bother paying an extra 50 to 100$ for and extra 1 fps? I mean come-on, not even the 7% realworld numbers that everyone has bandied about are here...

Cons.. no RAID (if that is important to you) although I have been told that HD's in Raid 0 mode add much more subjective speed on load save times than anything I have seen on this review).


I don't think this chipset seems to be worth it.. although "one review does not a proper evaluation make" theorum does hold true.

But if those numbers do hold true, and you are more interested in real world numbers over just sandra benchmark feelgood numbers, then it seems the obvious choice goes to a stable 845pe chipset..

what do others think?

Hope that wasn't too messed up for a first post

Oh excuse me..

I am sorry, I read that article so quickly I just realized that they didn't even compare it to a 845pe chipset that I thought they had, they compated it to a p4ge-v board.... hmm and still there is no difference with the 2 boards..


How sad, and to think here in Ottawa, a local computer store was selling the p4pe with raid sound etc for 220 cad$ last week.. back to 260$ this week..

Nails,


They used a TI200 Geforce3 card. I would say that has alot to do with the fact with the scores coming out real close to each other. It would have been nice to see them test it with at least a TI4600 or an ATI 9700 card to take advantage of the AGP 8x. I am sure that if a higher end card were used you would see a little more of a spread between the tested systems. I may be wrong, but it looks like the GPU was the bottle neck of the test. I will let you know about this board as I am planning on purchasing one as soon as they are available. Personally I wish they had a raid controller on board. I guess I am going to have to find a pci raid controller. I might even go overboard and get a scsi raid, LOL. All of these goodies will find a home in either a new vapo or prometia. The CPU I am waiting for is a 2.26 or 1.8 c1.

Buzzdog

not exactly impressive is it?

it's a nice option, but hardly gives you much if you can't run dual channel ddr 333-400 like the Nfoce2 chipset.

it's funny, the system that hardly needs the bandwidth has it all, then the system that needs it the most, gots none of it.

Hey Buzzdog, they've now posted a correction on the system specs page. The video card used for the tests was in fact an Abit Siluro GF4-Ti4200 OTES. That might have limited performance slightly compared to a Radeon 9700, but I would have expected the GB to perform better than it did.

I'm disappointed with the Granite Bay but, after some thought, not surprised. I think the excitement for a D-DDR chipset blinded all of us a little to what the system would realistically deliver.

Since D-DDR running at 266 delivers the same bandwidth as RDRAM PC1066, we could have looked at the performance of the 850E boards running Rambus 1066 to see what kind of boost was in store with GB. If anyone had the wisdom to do this, I never heard it. And if you still have hopes for a performace breakthrough from first-generation Dual DDR, you probably don't want to check it out now.

Now that the fanboy's are gone, on every benchmark except the memory tests, there is no more than a five percent difference between the same systems running an 850E/PC1066 and an 845PE with a single channel of DDR333. On the game benchmarks, the spread between PC1066 and DDR333 mirrors the results of the GB test, just a couple of frames per second even with a high end video card.

It should be obvious now that while there is a substantial difference between the memory bandwidth and processor bandwidth on the Northwood P4's, eliminating that gap has only a slight effect on system performance when testing with benchmark programs, and no discernable effect when using applications.

That's a radical departure from what almost everyone has believed about the P4 since the debut of the Northwood's. As Kunaak put it, "the system that needs (memory bandwidth) the most" doesn't need it as badly as everyone thought.


BHD

GB will bench very similarly to 850E boards with 1066 MHz RDRAM. But the advantage is that the motherboard+RAM will end up cheaper, and will be overclocking-friendly (unlike most 850E boards).

SiS655 may prove to be a better choice, *if* it handles high FSBs better than 648.

I would wait until someone else or anyone else other than these guys reviews the board before making a judgement on it.

Initially it probably won't be the Rdram killer we were hoping for but over a short time it will probably become an awesome chipset.

Whoops I posted my reply in the wrong thread.. my response went here:
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139933

Darn, I'm such a newbie

I think the advantage of the GB over the 850e chipset will be that you will have a higher ceiling as far as FSB goes. So at the end of the day, you should end up with a better performing system going with the GB option if you have all of the other components (CPU/Memory/etc) to go to higher fsb. The best way to look at GB is it is just another option that we have. It seems that just as soon as technology fixes one of the bottle necks to performance, the fix creates another. That is what I think drives us, trying to constantly push the envelope. It does not matter if you are going with the new technology or older technology, It does not matter if you use AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. We are all after the same thing, trying to get a little more out of it. This is what I love about these forums. Everyone is quick to help and give adcvise. You do not see a bunch of flame wars or arguing between people. There is a ton of great information and people on these forums. Thanks to everyone.

Buzzdog

when is this mobo gonna be for sale?

That's a radical departure from what almost everyone has believed about the P4 since the debut of the Northwood's. As Kunaak put it, "the system that needs (memory bandwidth) the most" doesn't need it as badly as everyone thought.

Click to expand...

Kunaak deserves more credit I too was waiting thinking this would be some huge upgrade cusp. Oh well? Might as well wait a few more weeks and get it since I waited this long.

I don't know why everyone is so disappointed, the chipset was supposed to offer RDRAM performance with DDR....so far that's exactly what it is.