Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra: The 875P in Retail Action

FSB Overclocking Results

For the first time ever, we will be conducting our overclocking tests with a real 800MHz FSB processor. The following is the setup we used for FSB overclocking on the 8KNXP Ultra:

After our ABIT BH7 review it was quite clear that single channel DDR Intel 845PE chipsets, at least, were able to operate well above 200MHz FSB. However, we have had trouble getting any dual channel DDR motherboard to reliably operate at 200MHz FSB, and that includes Intel E7205 and SiS 655 motherboards. The E7205 and SiS 655 motherboards we tested in our West Coast Labs simply can't reliably operate at 200MHz FSB using a low multiplier CPU or for that matter an official 800MHz FSB CPU. Obviously we wouldn't expect Intel's next dual channel DDR chipset to have trouble operating at 200MHz FSB. Indeed, this was not the case with the 875P-based 8KNXP Ultra. Using the configuration listed in the above chart and the default 12X multiplier, we were able to crank the FSB on the Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra up to 240MHz. This is very encouraging considering the CPU we are using is an early Engineering Sample, meaning shipping 2.4GHz 800MHz FSB processors should be at least as good if not better overclockers. Of course the only issue now is finding memory that will be able to match a 240MHz FSB, and we can tell you that it will be nearly impossible to find memory capable of 480MHz DDR speeds, so this high FSB overclock may be of little significance.

As we discovered with the 8INXP and SINXP1394, Gigabyte's DPS 2 (Dual Power System version 2) add-in card did nothing for overclocking in our numerous stress and benchmarking tests. Stability and performance were identical. In addition, we have yet to see any reproducible evidence that confirms Gigabyte's claim that onboard components will last longer with DPS 2 installed in Backup mode. So all in all, nothing has really changed with the second version of DPS compared to our test results with the first version of DPS.