MaximumPC 2008 10

in the lab^

reviews of the latest hardware and software

i

f you don’t just like Gigabit ports—you

love them— Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-DQ6

is the motherboard for you. This mobo

has four Gigabit ports that can be teamed

together for one seriously fat-ass network

connection.

Elsewhere, the board is typical Gigabyte;

it includes surface-mounted buttons and

the most clearly marked USB and FireWire

ports we’ve ever seen. So if you nuke your

USB drive because you plugged the USB

connector into a FireWire header, it’s your

own fault, brother.

The board, of course, is based on Intel’s

new P45 chipset and sports two physical x16

PCI-E 2.0 slots. One runs at x16, the other

at x8. Intel’s P45 doesn’t officially support

1,600MHz front-side bus speeds, but Giga-

byte says the board will hit 1,600 without

any issues. Since the GA-EP45-DQ6 is more

of a midrange board, Gigabyte went with

DDR2 instead of DDR3, which is understand-

able. Although it’s getting more affordable,

DDR3 is still expensive if you want modules

that will hit overclocked speeds of

1,600MHz or 1,800MHz.

We found no major layout gaffes

with the board, and, in fact, favor

the GA-EP45-DQ6’s design

over that of the MSI P45 Platinum we re-

viewed in September. While the P45 Platinum

gives you just two x1 slots, Gigabyte hands

you two x4 slots and an x1 PCI-E, as well as

the standard dual x16 slots.

The GA-EP45-DQ6 did lag behind the

MSI P45 Platinum in several benchmarks.

Some consumers will be troubled by this,

but these performance hiccups are to be

expected early in a motherboard’s release,

and BIOS updates usually solve them.

So what’s not to like? The GA-EP45-DQ6

is a bit pricey for a P45 board—about $70

more than the faster, but not as well spec’d,

P45 Platinum. And its price is within striking

distance of X48-based boards, which are

superior for CrossFire applications.

Still, if Gigabyte can correct the per-

formance kinks, this is a pretty nice board

for someone who isn’t running multi-GPU

applications and, of course, just loves

Gigabit ports. – g o r d o n m a h u n g

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6

Generous offerings make this P45 board unique

88 | MAXIMUMPC | oct 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

verdict

$260, http://www.gigabyte.com.tw

8

healthy dose of Pci -e

slots and well-labeled

USb and FireWire

headers.

Performance lags

behind other P45-

based motherboards.

martin sheen

gigabyte ga-ep45-dq6

charlie sheen

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2GB of DDR2/1066 RAM, a GeForce 8800 GTX, and Windows XP Pro SP2.

benchmarkS

Gigabyte P45 Ga-ep45-dQ6 mSi P45Platinum

pcmark Overall 8,402     8,756

pcmark ram 5,800 5,737

3dmark06 Overall 12,440  12,735

sciencemark 2.0 Overall 1,564    1,566

sciencemark 2.0 mem  6,980   7,112

Valve particle test 87   88

Ut3 (fps) 107    117

Fear (fps) 210 245

quake 4 (fps) 179 177

although it lagged behind

in a few benchmarks, this is

one of the nicest p45 boards

we’ve tested.