Installation and Programs:
Spire and I had quite a difficult time installing Windows XP with several restarts and blue screens. After the fourth or fourteenth crash, and a half gallon of whiskey, we decided to try some different RAM. We were using a 1GB set of G. Skill LE TCCD, we changed it out with the set of OCZ BH5 (as mentioned earlier), and within no time at all Windows was loading just fine with no more blue screens. After contacting Gigabyte about the issue with the TCCD RAM, they claimed that it is compatible, although we didn't have any luck.
The only included program that stood out to me was Gigabyte Easy Tune 5. This is an on the fly over clocking utility with monitoring features such as temperatures, fan speeds etc. I've never been much of a fan of on the fly overclocking, but for the sake of the review I checked it out and it not only worked, but it worked well. I got the same stable clock from this as I could by entering BIOS and trying to OC from there.
The Setup:
Now it is time to do some of the fun stuff; overclocking and benchmarking. Unfortunately not much overclocking was going to happen on this board with only 2.8Vdimm available for the voltage hungry BH5 sticks. I ended up mostly stable at 210MHz FSB speed. I say mostly stable because I was stable on prime95 and all of the benchmarking programs except for 3Dmark05 at this speed. For comparison today I am using a well known monster in the overclocking and SLI field; DFI's SLI-DR. I show the maximum overclock for both OCZ and G. Skill RAM on the DFI board just for a reference.
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester
• XP-120 heat sink
• 2 x 6600GT video cards
• (Video cards cooled by Zalman Reserator)
• 1 x 200GB Seagate
• NEC DVD Rom
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Just to keep it square across the board the OCZ BH5 timings for each board were matched as closely as possible to the following for both stock and overclocked systems.
• Tcl: 2
• Tras: 6
• Trcd: 2
• Trp: 2
• Trrd: 2
• Trc: 11
• Trfc: 15
• Trwt: 4
• 5.5 ns Read Preamble value
• 7ns Async Latency
• 1T timing
A much looser timing of 2.5-4-3-7 2T was used for the G. Skill LE tests.
