Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal (nVidia nForce4) SLI Intel Edition
Overclocking and stability
Let's take a look at the power converter. It uses a 4-phase power scheme in which there are four 1000 mkF, two 1500 mkF, and five 560 mkF capacitors.
But if we enable the VRM_CONN slot and install the DPS module, then the power supply modules operates following the 8-phase scheme.
By the way, in fact the DPS module uses four 1000 mkF and two 560 mkF capacitors. Besides, it uses its own cooling system with a heat pipe and a copper radiator.
Despite the theoretical advantage of using the DPS, we found no benefits in practice. In particular, the board runs absolutely stably without the DPS module, and no improvements in overclocking results were found after installing it. Besides, installation of the DPS module makes the assembly operator's job a bit complicated.
Now on to the overclocking features.
First, the Gigabyte 8N-SLI allows adjusting the system bus speed within 100 to 325 MHz in 1 MHz increments. And programmers at Gigabyte use a quadruple value in selecting the FSB speed, which allows raising the speed in 0.25 MHz increments (which in fact has no practical sense).
The memory frequency is adjustable in the same way (see the previous page). Advanced users can set the memory frequency manually, but the beginner users can only make use of the Linked mode at which the frequency is raised automatically.
Another item is the feature for changing the processor's multiplier.
The adjustment range is within 14 to 18 (the maximum for the test processor P4 660) in 1 increments. The next item deals with raising voltage on the processor (Vcore) within 0.8375V to 1.6V in 0.0125V increments.
The next item deals with raising the memory voltage.
The Vmem voltage can be raised by +0.3V in 0.1V increments. Besides, the overclocker can increase voltage on the FSB by 0.3V in 0.1V increments,
on the PCI Express bus (within the same range),
and on the SerialATA bus (within the same range),
Finally, the user can adjust the PCI Express bus within 100 MHz to 148 MHz.
Now on to the practical overclocking. At that, the board was not fun at all - with Extreme Edition, stable operation was possible at frequencies not higher than 306MHz.
Once a 200MHz bus processor (Pentium4 660) is installed, the maximum stable FSB speed was 240 MHz. In fact, in view of the preliminary character of the board's revision (that applies to the chipset, to all appearances), the overclocking results proved unsatisfactory. On the same grounds, we decided not to criticize Gigabyte for that the EasyTune 5 utility failed to operate properly with the 8N-Royal board.
Going on with the topic of software-driven overclocking, we note that the proprietary utility nVidia nTune (version 2.05.09) was able to recognize the chipset and was running quite stably on our board in question. In particular, the feature for adjusting the FSB speeds, memory frequency and memory latency timings was running properly. However, some other features like nTune Monitor did not work.
Our board offers quite interesting feature "Robust Graphics Booster" which should have somehow boosted the performance of the graphic subsystem.
But in practice we found no effect of enabling the feature (perhaps the situation will change in future versions of the BIOS).
Among Gigabyte's advanced technologies, there is "M.I.B. 2" aimed at automated optimization for memory settings. However, in the current BIOS version it hasn't been implemented yet.
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