Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6

Stability

We reset the BIOS back to its default values and tried running the system with a single 9800 GTX first of all. We started by running Prime95 on all cores, then added 3DMark06 looping continually once we found Prime was stable.

While this is an open test bench, no other fans were used (other than for the hard drive and CPU) so the heatpipes were left to cope with the heat without aids. We came back a day later to find it all working perfectly fine and the system was completely responsive – a great result.

We then swapped out the single 9800 GTX for two HD 3870s in CrossFire and tried the same again, but unfortunately CrossFire kept hard locking the system after just a few hours of looping 3DMark06.

This is something that we've also experienced on the MSI P45 Platinum (there’s a review coming shortly) and generally found CrossFire not to work 100 percent reliably on P45 boards with current Catalyst 8.4 or 8.5 drivers. It shouldn’t be a problem but, for those of you looking to run CrossFire in extended gaming sessions on P45 (and this Gigabyte board in particular), it's worth bearing in mind.

Overclocking

First off, we tried our favourite QX9650 which instantly hauled itself up to 470MHz FSB – sadly, when we tried to load it in Windows it just wasn't stable. Playing with it a little more to make it stable, we found the GTL reference changes weren't as fine as we'd like – the feature is sensitive to small changes and 0.02V jumps just didn't provide the finesse we needed. With a 1.3V CPU termination voltage, 1.66V CPU PLL, 0.74V GTL Reference 1 and 2 and 1.308V MCH core voltage we achieved 450MHz FSB on this quad-core fully stable at default voltage.

We found that despite changing the CPU voltage quite considerably in the BIOS to 1.4+V, CPU-Z read only 1.2V in Windows. Curiously we checked in EasyTune 6 and the same thing was reported – the CPU was left at its default voltage yet all the other voltage changes mirrored the BIOS settings exactly. We upped the CPU voltage to 1.4125V in ET6 and this reported an increase to 1.387V in both CPU-Z and ET6.

We increased the frequency to 470MHz again with the same settings as above, although now using ET6 to increase the CPU voltage and FSB. This left the system rock solid, but when we increased the system to 480MHz FSB it finally locked up again. After some time playing, we found ET6 needs gentle, simple increases to coax the system to play ball since everything has to keep ticking over in Windows while you do it. When we then tried booting in at stock settings and overclocking/overvolting all in one go using ET6 to do all the settings above in one go, the system locked up instantly.

Trying for maximum CPU MHz and we came into the same problem above – we had to set everything bar the FSB and CPU voltage because the two could only be set successfully using ET6. The problem we found was that changing the multiplier on an unlocked Extreme Edition above the usual maximum confused the hell out of the software and the clock speed went everywhere.

Overclocking our E8500 was a very "average" experience – we could get the system to 388MHz x 9.5 which is only 3,686MHz, but any higher and ET6 locked up. When trying to attain the highest front side bus we also ran into similar problems hitting 470+MHz using ET6. We can only hope future BIOS revisions are better suited to applying all the settings correctly so we can overclock more easily, at the time of writing the current F3h BIOS doesn't do what we need.

Value and Conclusions

We confirmed with Gigabyte that the board should be in UK stores by the end of this week at £146-150 ex VAT which makes it £171-176 to us normal VAT paying folk, but some online stores are currently listing the board at around £165. Neither seems particularly competitive when you compare it to the £119 Asus P5Q Deluxe we reviewed a few weeks ago, or even the P5Q3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n that's only £151 (Asus RRP) – in fact, the Gigabyte DQ6 is more in line with the P5Q Premium, but that's yet to see the light of day.

£160+ puts it in the field of premium X48 products, but even then we'd still get the EP45-DQ6 over the X48-DQ6 unless you're specifically wanting the DDR3 ‘T’ version which is quite a bit faster and lower power, but offers fewer features.

Yes, it's the most fully featured P45 board available, but is it better featured than the Asus P5Q Deluxe? A car with a hot tub might be infinitely cool, but not if it's needlessly excessive and impractical. Both have ‘hardware RAID’ ports, onboard backlit switches, extra PCI-Express x16 space and Energy Efficient parts to them. The Asus has its ExpressGate feature but the Gigabyte has four Gigabit Ethernet sockets – both of these are Ooooo features, but offer questionable genuine value for money through repeated use.

What annoys us about this four Gigabit LAN ‘feature’ is that it's essentially the same as Asus ’16 power phase’ m'larky – bigger numbers are better, right? We can't help but again feel the political wrangling between these two companies has made hot tub products that are all that, but could be so much more refined. Unfortunately for Gigabyte, we feel the Asus offers more potential and better performance which is why we gave it the recommended award in the first place.

Even though it's £160+, Gigabyte has made an all rounder product suitable for a home workstation-media-hub type thing. For example, you can serve an entire University hall or LAN event with a huge set of RAID arrays and four Gigabit Ethernet connections serving all manner of data to people, if you were so inclined, but for any home user this is sheer and utter overkill.

It will not make your ping lower or gaming faster because you'll be limited by your net connection, your router or other people connecting to you – a single PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet is more than enough for gaming or home media sharing. Gigabyte's advantage is that it offers a complete top to bottom range of EP45-DS5, -DS4, and -DS3 products to suit the LAN servers to single users. This one will simply be for the fringe end of the spectrum, that's all.

Final Thoughts

We do think Gigabyte has made a motherboard with a lot of potential here – the board currently works very well under default conditions. It has tons of features—and some are genuinely great little nuggets—far, far better software and very good performance for DDR2 but even though it has lots of BIOS options we are unable to use with the board in its current state. Strip out the four Gigabit Ethernet sockets and strap on 802.11n Wi-Fi instead would give it a similar high end appeal but with more variety for home users. The hardware RAID implementation also needs more thought put into it.

What is has done for us is lay the foundations for what could be some awesome value friendly EP45-DS3R or the DS5 that we had a first look at not too long ago. However, we'll give it a few months to see what Gigabyte comes out with on the BIOS side before we really see if they can shine.

• Performance
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• 8/10

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• -
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• 6/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 8/10

What do these scores mean?