Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra: The 875P in Retail Action

Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra: Stress Testing

We managed to test the 8KNXP Ultra in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 240MHz.
   
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz and 400MHz in dual DDR operation at the most aggressive timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results

As usual we ran a large load of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the 8KNXP Ultra was absolutely stable at the overclocked FSB speed of 240MHz. We ran our usual array of stress tests, including Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 24 hours. Just as we did with Gigabyte's 8INXP and SINXP1394, we ran lots of other tasks such as data compression, various DX8 games, and light apps like Word and Excel while Prime95 was running. Finally, we reran our entire benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and XMPEG. In the end, 240MHz FSB was the highest overclock we were able to achieve with our conservative overclocking setup without encountering any reliability problems.

Memory Stress Test Results

In our experience, the best motherboards on the market are usually the ones that can handle high memory speeds, not just high FSB speeds. As far as actual memory speeds are concerned, some the best motherboards are able to run memory at 333MHz with all memory banks filled. Here were the timings we were able to achieve in that scenario:

Certainly six DIMM slots is a lot, but apparently operating at CAS2/2T/6T/2T in dual DDR333 mode with all of these slots filled isn't a big deal for the 8KNXP Ultra, and is without a doubt an impressive feat. Since the 875P chipset supports up to 4GB of memory and the 8KNXP Ultra has six DIMM slots, you'll be able to save cash on memory. That is, instead of buying four 1GB memory modules that are about four times as expensive as 512MB modules like you would be forced to do with desktop motherboards that only support four DIMM slots, you have the luxury of buying four 512MB modules and just two 1GB modules. Of course, unless you have applications that can use this much memory, there's no advantage to having six DIMM slots expect to say that they are all functional up to 400MHz.

Here were the timings we were able to achieve with six memory modules running at 400MHz:

CAS2/2T/6T/2T with six banks filled and running at 400MHz DDR is no small feat by any means.

As usual, we ran several memory stress tests and general apps to make sure all these timings were stable. We started off by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. Neither stress test was able to bring the 8KNXP Ultra to its knees.