Market Survey, Part 2: Six Premium Pentium 4 LGA775 Boards

Gigabyte GA-8I925XE-G (Intel 925XE)

Board revision: 1.1

BIOS version: F2c

The second Gigabyte board, the 8I925XE-G model, is much more basic in its equipment, but nonetheless ranks as a high-end board. Its maker does without the powerful DPS module for power supply here, though a four-phase power converter is deployed anyway.

An ITE controller provides another two UltraATA ports, to supplement the single one provided by the Intel chipset. The Southbridge offers all of four SATA connections. The Broadcom network chip does Gigabit Ethernet and connects via PCI Express. There is also a FireWire chip from Texas Instruments.

The BIOS features and overclocking options are quite extensive and resemble those of the 8AENXP-DW. This board also had difficulty with CL3 memory, but increasing DDR2 voltage again resolved the instability.

Compared to its even better-equipped big brother, the included extras with the 8I925XE-G are relatively sparse. All necessary cables, a thorough manual, and the drivers needed are, however, on hand.

Unfortunately, this board did not run dependably at all times. It crashed in a few instances, the cause of which could not be determined by the end of testing. This fact is significant inasmuch as its far better-equipped big brother had no problems at all.