Intel's E7205: Granite Bay Hits the Streets
by Evan Lieb on November 18, 2002 9:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gigabyte 8INXP Rev.1: Basic Features
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Motherboard Specifications |
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CPU
Interface
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Socket-478
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Chipset
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Intel
E7205 MCH
Intel 82801DB ICH4 |
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Bus
Speeds
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100
- 200MHz (in 1MHz increments)
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Core
Voltages Supported
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up
to 1.725V (in 0.025V increments)
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I/O
Voltages Supported
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N/A
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DRAM
Voltages Supported
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up
to 2.8V in 0.1V increments
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Memory Slots
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4 184-pin
DDR DIMM Slots
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Expansion Slots
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1 AGP
8X Slot
5 PCI Slots |
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Onboard RAID
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Promise
PDC20276
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Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394
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USB
2.0 supported through South Bridge
No FireWire |
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Onboard LAN
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Intel
RC82540EM Gigabit LAN
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Onboard Audio
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Realtek
ALC650
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Onboard Serial ATA
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Silicon
Image 3112A controller
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BIOS
Revision
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D10b
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With the introduction of Intel's E7205 chipset, Gigabyte has initiated a new marketing campaign centered around the word "dual". Gigabyte is marketing the 8INXP as "The 6-Dual Miracle". The six features that make the 8INXP the "6-dual miracle" are:
- Dual Power System (DPS): this is a separate, add-in card that gives the 8INXP 6-phase power circuitry instead of 3-phase. Gigabyte claims that, in Parallel mode (versus Backup mode), DPS is able to deliver better system stability (especially while overclocked) in addition to longer onboard components life. Skip to the BIOS and Overclocking section for our test results with DPS installed.
- Dual Logical Processors: this is nothing more than Gigabyte's way of saying their board supports Intel's Hyper Threading technology.
- Dual Channel DDR: this is pretty self-explanatory. As you should know by now, Gigabyte's 8INXP motherboard uses Intel's E7205 (Granite Bay) chipset, which supports Dual DDR266 operation, for a peak memory bandwidth of 4.27GB/s.
- Dual RAID: this is Gigabyte's way of saying their board supports both Serial ATA RAID and IDE RAID. Read on to find out more about these two features.
- Dual BIOS: this feature is also fairly self-explanatory. The 8INXP supports two BIOS chips. This feature is nice to have if you corrupt your first BIOS chip (e.g. you lose power to your system as you're updating your primary BIOS). You can switch over to the second BIOS chip in this situation, and hot have to go through the trouble of correcting the issue through other, time-consuming means.
- Dual Cooling: this is the least interesting of the six "dual miracles". The North Bridge HSF and DPS HSF form the "Dual Cooling" feature. Yes, this is very cheesy.
For LAN, Gigabyte goes with Gigabit technology. Gigabyte chooses Intel's RC82540EM Gigabit chip for onboard LAN; this chip supports up to 1000Mbit/s bandwidth and is found in only one other recent P4 motherboard that we know of (MSI's 845PE Max2-FIR). Setting up Gigabit via the onboard Intel controller was a cinch, and not any more difficult than setting up the P4G8X's Broadcom Gigabit LAN in addition to any other 10/100 solution.
Moving on, we see that Gigabyte decided to choose Realtek's ALC650 chip for onboard sound. This 6-channel solution isn't anything special really, and is found on the vast majority of motherboards these days. It's interesting to note that we haven't encountered a motherboard without onboard sound in the last few months. This says a lot about the fierce competition in the motherboard market.
The 8INXP's I/O configuration is pretty normal for the most part. Some of the I/O ports include features like two PS/2 ports, two serial ports, one parallel port, a Game port, two rear USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit LAN port, and Mic In, Line In, and Line Out, which drive the onboard sound.
Gigabyte decides to slap on the latest and "greatest" feature for an onboard device by including Silicon Image's 3112A Serial ATA controller. We just discussed this SATA chip in the ASUS P4G8X section, but there are a few other motherboards that use this SATA controller as well, including the Intel D845PEBT2, Epox 4PEA+, and ECS L4S8A. The 3112A is capable of supporting up to two independent Serial ATA devices, as well as RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). As we've said before, we'd rather wait for chipset makers to integrate SATA into their South Bridges before we get excited about how Serial ATA drives and devices will perform.
The 8INXP's IDE support is much better than the P4G8X's. As is standard now, the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors support two channels each, or up to four IDE devices total. In addition, there are two other IDE connectors, powered by the onboard Promise PDC20276 RAID controller. Each of the two IDE RAID connectors supports 2 channels each, and therefore up to four IDE devices. In total, you can hookup a grand total of 8 IDE devices, in addition to two SATA devices via the two onboard SATA connectors. Most users should be happy with this amount of device support. Before we forget, we should mention that the PDC20276 RAID controller itself supports RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) arrays. For more information on Promise's PDC20276 controller, head on over to their product information page here.
USB 2.0 support is powered by Intel's South Bridge, aka ICH4. This means the Gigabyte 8INXP is capable of supporting up to six USB 2.0 ports. In addition to the two rear USB 2.0 ports, there are also two USB headers at the bottom of the board. Gigabyte throws in a four-port USB bracket that connects to both USB headers. This is very nice to have as you don't have to take the trouble to go out and purchase a USB bracket
Unfortunately, this board did not come with FireWire. This feature would have really made the 8INXP a complete solution, but it's a minor setback nonetheless.
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hrumsey - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
Regarding previous comment:And I told this thing to show e-mail address. hrumsey@charter.net if anyone has questions.
It also removed paragraph indents that would make the above post a bit more readable- apologies.
And a clarification: The ZCR card could be seen to be flashed only because a jumper change is needed to put them in flash mode. In normal mode, the Thunder K8S Pro S2882 BIOS was squashing the Adaptec 2010S / 2015S BIOS.
Damn, I hope Google indexes that comment well.
Speaking of which, for you-know-who:
Tyan Thunder K8S Pro Adaptec 2010S 2015S ZCR RAID BIOS problem incompatibility bug hang failure download flash PCI-X
Tyan 2882 K8S Pro Thunder ZCR Adaptec 2015S 2010S RAID bug hang failure problem incompatibility PCI-X flash BIOS download
Thunder Tyan 2882 K8S Pro ZCR Adaptec RAID 2010S 2015S BIOS incompatibility problem failure hang PCI-X BIOS bug flash download
wildly incompetent screen-reading technical support monkeys
beta-testing on customers
See previous comment
hrumsey - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
Anandtech's evaluation covers how good Tyan's tech support is in the absence of any real problem for them to deal with. I would suggest that this is not an adequate criterion.Our experiences were different.
The issue of product quality is relevant here, since it makes the quality of technical support more important if the product is poor. My company tried Tyan boards several years ago, and gave up when along with 4 DOAs, 3 quick in-service failures gave a defective rate of almost 50%. I mistakenly thought almost 10 years would be enough for the company to straighten out.
We ordered 3 Thunder Pro S2882s for a client taking a website inhouse who wanted a 64-bit option- this was before Intel's 64-bit Xeons showed up.
All of the following happened under time pressure, which isn't unusual, and why better support than Tyan's is necessary:
One of the three boards was DOA; wouldn't flash any of three Adaptec 2010S ZCR cards; the other two would. Tyan's tech support essentially kept assuming we were doing something wrong and, and at one point asked if we had the current BIOS on the ZCR cards. They must not have any sort of decent database, since the problem had to be explained anew every call. After they admitted the board was bad, they failed to warn us of their shipping deadline for replacing the board (which they will do, and with an E. Coast vendor and them in CA was necessary).
All the boards failed to see the ZCR cards. First tech said that couldn't be happening, second knew about the problem and said the "E" BIOS fixed it. It didn't. We delivered servers with drives unmirrored.
Site setup was busy for a while. When I finally had a chance to work on ZCR problem, Tyan could find no record of the problem (none of the emails we exchanged except ones I sent had case #s in the header). I explained everything again, and once again had to assure them again that we'd gotten the obvious stuff right. First tech said he didn't know how it could be happening, and thought I was missing something. Got email next day from supervisor acknowledging there was a problem and saying (again) they had a new BIOS out that would fix the problem. Downloaded, sent tech onsite to install. Didn't work, same result- ZCR card option grayed out in BIOS, system hangs. When I had a chance to go down and work on it personally, once again, no record of case. I went through everything from scratch once more, assuring them that yes, we'd read the FAQs and yes, the system was plugged in, and yes, we had tried every possible combination of their two blasted relevant jumpers, and that in fact there were about eight other germane parameters we had tried which none of them had thought of- and all of this while wasting valuable onsite time. When I finally convinced them that 1) we were competent and 2) it wasn't working, I was told I'd get a call back "shortly" from the responsible engineer. Three hours later, in a darkened factory, at 5:14:55 just as I was leaving, I got a call back from the engineer who actually knew what was going on. He finally admitted we had everything right. He had no solution, but agreed with my suggestion for testing and said he'd check- he lacked authority(!)- to see if management would authorize the replacement board I'd been asking for. And they did, but there shouldn't have been any question.
Next trip down I replaced the board in one server, picking the server in whichhe Gigabit Ethernet ports had failed- and it still didn't #$%^& work. Tyan said it had been working the day before for them with a 2010S ZCR card, and until today, I didn't know whether they were lying or not. I cussed some and ordered $1200 worth of controllers to replace what Tyan couldn't get right 5 months after the product's release.
Today I checked and saw that they have a new BIOS for the board available that "Fixes PCI ZCR card hangs system during POST". It's the third BIOS for which they've made that claim, and you know, it really doesn't matter whether they're right this time or not. And if they're not, it doesn't matter whether they're just mistaken or actually lying- theend result is the same.
We saw five of their high-end server boards. One DOA, one in-service failure, all five with a major design flaw. Eight years is enough time to take care of company-wide failures. Any company that will release a $500 server board with a 40% failure rate, and without first ensuring that everything on it actually works, and who then can't tell for five months whether or not they've fixed the resulting problems, and whose tech support is staffed with folks who can't deal those problems- well, that's a company whose products you want to steer very clear of.