Three Premium nForce4 Motherboards from Gigabyte, Jetway, and MSI

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Jetway 775GT4-SLI, Continued

We liked the dual LED indicators in the built-in Port 80 module, designed for system diagnosis, and the board’s built-in power-on and reset switches, which are useful when trying out extreme overclocking settings. Jetway also provides a wide variety of such options in its BIOS as well.

On the downside, we found that it’s not possible to completely deactivate energy saving options for the CPU. This had a mild influence on our benchmarking results, but it wasn’t terribly dramatic. In addition, we couldn’t get our Corsair memory modules to work at ideal timing values of CL3-2-2-8 or 1T Timing ; only when we boosted CAS latency to CL4 did system operation stabilize (for reasons unknown).

More annoying was the fact that the motherboard changed the Active-to-Precharge timing value from 8 to 24 every time it rebooted, forcing us to reset that value manually. Selection of the "BIOS Cacheable" option caused the operating system to hang without starting up, and Windows only recognized the four logical processors in the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 after we manually entered the right multiplier value (16) in the BIOS.

In the final analysis, only one of these issues led to really massive problems. But the abundance of bugs shows that the vendor still has to do some work to get this product really right.

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