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Gigabyte GA-G1975X (i975X)Date: 15/03/2006
By: Svyatoslav Solovyov, Dmitry Sofronov
Early in November last year, Gigabyte presented a new line of motherboards based on Intel 955 and Intel 975 chipsets to the public. The first unusual and mysterious motherboard in the line, as was expected, was the solution aimed at "overclockers and extreme gamers" (cited) - Gigabyte G1 Turbo 975X which is today our long-awaited guest at our test lab.  Gigabyte G1975X in future The exterior of the board is extravagant enough. While watching it in operation from close proximity, you get the impression of a boiling life in some fantasy city of the future. The components are indeed hot, because G1 Turbo 975X uses the most interesting technologies by Gigabyte. The most interesting is the "Turbojet technology" - a proprietary feature developed especially for providing maximum efficiency of cooling the motherboard's chipset and the power components. Additionally: C.R.S. (CMOS Reload Switch) - a button that allows clearing all the BIOS settings in charge of overclocking with a single press; an onboard button to control the motherboard's power; there is such a useful thing like a POST indicator; an integrated 8-channel high-quality solution by Creative - Sound Blaster 24-bit, which is no match to ALC-codecs; the already customary DualBIOS; implementation of two PCI Express x16 slots for video cards (in the SLI mode, both operate in the PCI Express x8 mode); "Easy Tune 5" software for "dummies" in the world of overclocking... The list can be continued more.. Specifications declared by the manufacturer:
The board was packaged in a box of stylish "book jacket",  which describes all the advantages of this motherboard. Package bundleThe board came bundled with the following items: 
The package bundle is very rich, but ... Annoying was that it lacks a plate for plugging in a good old COM port. Of course, this interface will soon come into non-existence, but - who knows "if that may be needed." But no. If needed, a plate for COM-port would have to be purchased separately elsewhere. Board layout To start with, let's examine the most eye-catching onboard component - the Turbojet system. We have already seen systems like that on motherboards by Abit, ECS, ASUS. Gigabyte goes on with own good tradition and keeps improving the cooling system. In fact, the new system appears to be a structure made of two "wind tunnels" having a 40 mm fan on each of the ends. The first "tube" is in charge of cooling the north bridge, the second one - for maintaining the temperature mode for the board's power components. We can say the following regarding the operational efficiency: in small- to medium-sized housings constrained in the inner space the system will show excellent results and effectively cool the hottest components. However, it should be noted that a person seriously into overclocking, willing to pay over 300$ for a motherboard of such level is unlikely to install it inside such a housing. Also, it's no good interfering with the established system of air flows within the housing. In our view, the noise level also exceeds the admissible level and resembles the bygone greatness of Thermaltake coolers for Intel Pentium III platform - SuperOrb and DragonOrb. There is one more note regarding the Turbojet. We can't ignore the dimensions of such a cooling system, so not every non-standard cooler can be installed on Gigabyte G1975X, and the overclocker should be well aware of that! Besides, these dimensions have prevented engineers at Gigabyte to wire the interfaces in compliance with the ATX/BTX standard, so some ports had to be brought over to separate plates. In far not all the housings there is enough space for such a number.  Therefore, on the rear side of the board there is merely a small part of connectors needed to the user, namely, PS/2 ports of the mouse and keyboard, analogous outputs of the sound card, 2 USB 2.0 ports, and an output of the network card.  Now let's look at the power supply subsystem. The 4-phase pulsed voltage stabilizer that provides power to the processor includes 3 field-effect transistors per phase, seven 560 mkF, four 1500 mkF, and three 1000 mkF capacitors. The memory voltage stabilizer is reinforces by inductive components. Now on to the wiring of the board.  As we see, the Turbojet takes the lion's share of the space onboard, but the remaining space is separated in a very well thought-out way. Under the processor connector, there are 4 slots for DDR-II memory, with the color marking of paired to switch modules to the dual-channel mode. Even if quite a massive board is installed into the first PCI Express x16 slot, the video card won't be able to hinder installation of the memory, which is a definite plus for the assembly operator. Gigabyte G1975X has not one interface for plugging in IDE devices, as it should be expected in accord with the used south bridge ICH7R, but two. The company engineers decided not to compromise and implemented an additional channel as a separate ITE IT8211F chip, which in turn allows plugging in up to four IDE devices to the motherboard. There are 4 interface connectors for plugging in hard disks and other SATA drives. The picture is complemented by the FireWire controller on the Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip and a network controller based on the Broadcom BCM5789KFB chip of Gigabit Ethernet standard.  The feature which will definitely appeal to the amateurs of hi-fi sound in computer games is Gigabyte's implementation of onboard 8-channel solution by Creative - the Creative Sound Blaster 24-bit. These are also EAX 3.0, and full 24 bit / 96 KHz already integrated into the motherboard. Maybe the quality of sound is a bit worse than that of its "separate" brother, but in any case this is definitely better than cheap AC'97 codecs.  And this component is indeed worth of a careful attention from overclocking fanciers. The combined block which is made up of a POST indicator, a power control button, and a button to reset BIOS settings to the defaults. Together with the proprietary DualBIOS technology, it makes a formidable word-combination - the so-called "irrepressible overclocking machine".
Using Gigabyte G1975XThe BIOS is traditional Award of version 6. As is always the case with using motherboards by Gigabyte, you can explore the fine settings only by pressing the key combination Ctrl+F1 on entering the BIOS Setup. The board offers the following overclocking options:
Also here is all what the overclocker needs. Besides, with Easy Tune 5 you can change practically the same parameters from within Windows without having to reboot the computer. The system monitoring facilities in the BIOS allow controlling the CPU temperature, voltages applied to the processor, memory, the +3.3 and +12 V lines, as well as the rotational speeds of the 3 fans. Gigabyte has also provided the technology which automatically decelerates rotation of the processor cooler when load on the processor drops. We now move on right to testing the performance. Test configurationTest-bench configuration:
Immediately upon the start-up, we load the CPU-Z utility and find that Gigabyte originally cycles the system bus at 274 MHz instead of the nominal 266! As a result, the processor's clock speed amounts to as many as 3836 MHz in the nominal. In this case, it is no wonder if G1 Turbo starts slightly overtaking all the other boards built on the i975X chipset. For better precision, we ran tests with both overstated FSB and with that forcedly set to 266 MHz (the factual frequency amounts to 265.6 MHz, which is very close to the nominal). We decided to make comparisons versus Foxconn 955X7AA built on the kindred chipset Intel 955X which has already been to our test lab. PerformanceWe used our standard pack of benchmarks in order to give an impartial comparison of results versus those for the Foxconn motherboard. FSB = 274 MHz, Memory = 533 MHz
FSB = 266 MHz, Memory = 533 MHz
FSB = 266 MHz, Memory = 667 MHz
In the "standard mode", i.e. with the overstated FSB, the G1 Turbo certainly surpasses Foxconn 955X7AA. But with the FSB forcedly set to 266 MHz, the Foxconn board acquires some small advantage (within the measurement error) which is most likely caused by the specifics of the motherboard's wiring. Final WordsOn the whole, Gigabyte G1975X left a positive impression. The board reveals the capabilities of the i975X chipset, demonstrates a good performance level and uses all the latest technological novelties by Intel (including the licensed CrossFire). Pros:
Cons:
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