Gigabyte GA-8I915G Pro review

Although much of the brouhaha surrounding the new PCI Express chipsets is based on its performance and bandwidth enhancements, the 915G is Intel's bash at an integrated platform. Rather than going for all-out performance, Gigabyte's 8I915G Pro concentrates on the extra features of 915G - namely, PCI Express, Intel HDA (High Definition Audio) and 915G's integrated Intel GMA900 (Graphics Media Accelerator 900).

Intel isn't claiming great things of the GMA900 chipset (see boxout, right), which is just as well. The first test we ran to assess its 3D performance was Unreal Tournament 2004, in which it scored an unspectacular 15 frames per second at SXGA. Its shared memory restricts bandwidth to, at the very best, around a quarter of that of the fastest cards around at the minute. Add to that the lack of hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting) and it was never going to perform brilliantly, but we were nonetheless surprised at how poorly it fared. In practice, dropping the resolution to 800 x 600 gives playable results with decent-looking DirectX 9 effects, but load up Far Cry and crying is pretty much all you'll be doing; GMA900 can't pull off any kind of sensible frame rate.

Continuing with the features-over-performance approach, the 8I915G Pro doesn't take DDR2 RAM, being fitted with standard DDR DIMM slots that will take either DDR333 or DDR400 modules (DDR and DDR2 modules aren't physically compatible). Whether this is an attempt on Gigabyte's part to offset the cost of upgrading, or simply nervousness about the stability and performance of DDR2 with 915, is unclear. But there's no doubting it will cut your costs, at the expense of the extra 133MHz of memory bandwidth afforded by DDR2-533. The board also lacks Intel's Matrix RAID system; in fact, despite sporting no less than four SATA channels, there's no provision for RAID at all, which is highly unusual in a modern board. Gigabyte's 'P' variant of this board includes a further two EIDE channels (the 915 chipset by itself supports only one) with RAID capability courtesy of a Silicon Image chipset. The 'G' board has the solder pads, but the sockets and RAID controller are missing.

The 8I915G's quirks even extend to the packaging: if you want to test that your setup is working before going to the trouble of installing it in a case, the board's box comes complete with strategically placed perforated slots; put your floppy and optical drives in the box along with the hard disk and the board itself on top, and you have your very own test bed.

Features-wise you'll not be wanting for much with this board: those that stand out include both coaxial S/PDIF in and out, gigabit Ethernet - not always a given on a board at this price - and three PCI Express 1x peripheral slots. In addition, you get two conventional PCI connectors, plus a PCI Express 16x graphics slot for use when you finally run out of patience with the GMA900's meagre performance.

The backplane adds PS/2, parallel, two USB 2 and six audio jacks for the eight-channel HDA audio. An off-board PCI backplate gives two more USB 2 ports, plus both mini and full-size FireWire connections. Unlike the Flex Memory option of full 915 and 925 DDR2 implementations, dual-channel memory performance with the Gigabyte is still contingent upon you having DIMMs of equal capacity in each pair of DIMM sockets.

2D application benchmarks are way ahead of its 3D performance: the 8I915G pulled in 1.99 with a 3.6GHz P4 in the LGA775 socket, which is a good score in terms of what Pentium 4 systems have been capable of up until now. It's held back by the lack of RAID options, though.