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Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-X48-DQ6 Review & Overclocking - PAGE 1
William Henning - Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

In  our second X48 review we take a look at Gigabyte's GA-X48-DQ6 - their top of the line X48 board, equipped with more SATA-II and USB2.0 ports than you can shake a stick at.

The board and packaging certainly look impressive enough, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up in comparison to Gigabyte's past excellent X38 board, and the Asus P5E3 Permium WiFi, a great DDR3 based X48 board.

Its pretty well known that the X48 chipset is just a (fairly minor) upgrade of the excellent X38 chipset; and our past reviews have shown them to have a similar performance, while the X38 seemed to have an edge with DDR2 support. The question is, will DDR2 work well on this X48 board?

But before we talk about anything else, let's take a look at the specifications, straight from Gigabyte's site.

Specifications

CPU
  1. Support for an Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme processor/ Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor/Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor/ Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition/Intel® Pentium® D processor/ Intel® Pentium® 4 processor Extreme Edition/Intel® Pentium® 4 processor/ Intel® Celeron® processor in the LGA 775 package
    (Go to GIGABYTE's website for the latest CPU support list.)
  2. L2 cache varies with CPU
  3. 1600/1333/1066/800 MHz FSB
Chipset
  1. North Bridge: Intel® X48 Chipset
  2. South Bridge: Intel® ICH9R
Memory
  1. 4 x 1.8V DDR2 DIMM sockets supporting up to 8 GB of system memory
  2. Dual channel memory architecture
  3. Support for DDR2 1200/1066/800/667MHz, ECC, non ECC memory modules.
Audio
  1. Realtek ALC889A codec
  2. High Definition Audio
  3. 2/4/5.1/7.1-channel
  4. Support for DTS (dts NEO:PC)
  5. Support for S/PDIF In/Out
  6. Support for CD In
LAN
  1. Realtek 8111C chip (10/100/1000 Mbit)
Expansion Slots
  1. 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (The PCIE_16_1 slot supports x16; the PCIE_16_2 supports x16.)
  2. 3 x PCI Express x1 slots (share with the PCIE_16_2 slot)
  3. 2 x PCI slots
Storage Interface South Bridge:
  1. 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATAII0, SATAII1, SATAII2, SATAII3, SATAII4, SATAII5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices
  2. Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10
GIGABYTE SATA2 chip:
  1. 1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices
  2. 2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATAIIA, GSATAIIB) supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
  3. Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD
iTE IT8718 chip:
  1. 1 x floppy disk drive connector supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive
IEEE 1394
  1. T.I. TSB43AB23 chip
  2. Up to 3 IEEE 1394a ports (2 on the back panel, 1 via the IEEE 1394 bracket connected to the internal IEEE 1394 header)
USB
  1. Integrated in the South Bridge
  2. Up to 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 on the back panel, 4 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers)
Internal I/O Connectors
  1. 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector
  2. 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector
  3. 1 x 4-pin PCIe 12V power connector
  4. 1 x floppy disk drive connector
  5. 1 x IDE connector
  6. 8 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
  7. 1 x CPU fan header
  8. 2 x system fan headers
  9. 1 x power fan header
  10. 1 x North Bridge fan header
  11. 1 x front panel header
  12. 1 x front panel audio header
  13. 1 x CD In connector
  14. 1 x S/PDIF In header
  15. 1 x S/PDIF Out header
  16. 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers
  17. 1 x IEEE 1394a header
  18. 1 x parallel port header
  19. 1 x serial port header
  20. 1 x power LED header
  21. 1 x chassis intrusion header
Back Panel Connectors
  1. 1 x PS/2 keyboard port
  2. 1 x PS/2 mouse port
  3. 1 x coaxial S/PDIF Out connector
  4. 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
  5. 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
  6. 2 x IEEE 1394a ports
  7. 2 x RJ-45 port
  8. 6 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Rear Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out/Line In/Line Out/Microphone)
I/O Controller
  1. iTE IT8718 chip
H/W Monitoring
  1. System voltage detection
  2. CPU/System temperature detection
  3. CPU/System/Power fan speed detection
  4. CPU overheating warning
  5. CPU/System/Power fan fail warning
  6. CPU fan speed control
BIOS
  1. Supports QuadBIOS
  2. 2 x 8 Mbit flash ROM
  3. Use of licensed AWARD BIOS
  4. PnP 1.0a, DMI 2.0, SM BIOS 2.4, ACPI 1.0b.
Unique Features
  1. Support for Dynamic Energy Saver
  2. Support for @BIOS
  3. Support for Download Center
  4. Support for Q-Flash
  5. Support for EasyTune
  6. Support for Xpress Install
  7. Support for Xpress Recovery2
Form Factor
  1. ATX Form Factor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm
   
next: The Board »

Article Index

1.Introduction
2.The Board
3.The BIOS
4.More BIOS
5.Test Setup & Benchmarks Used
6.Business Winstone & Content Creation
7.WinRAR & HDTach
8.LAME MP3 & TMPGEnc
9.Call of Duty & Commanche 4
10.Doom 3 & Quake 4
11.Halo, Jedi Knight & UT4K
12.Sandra
13.RightMark Read & Write
14.RightMark Latency & Bandwidth
15.Overclocking & Conclusion
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