FarCry v1.1
Using the Fort demo at 640×480 the Albatron K8X800 Pro II did a little better than the Gigabyte motherboard.
Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 does a flyby and botmatch, and was run at 640×480. With both sections of the motherboard the Albatron K8X800 Pro II does better than the Gigabyte K8NS Pro.
Comanche 4
With Comanche 4 at 640×480 the Gigabyte K8NS Pro does a little better than the Albatron K8X800 Pro II but not much.
3DMark03
The trend continued with 3DMark03 with the Gigabyte K8NS Pro scoring over 200 3Dmarks lower than the Albatron K8X800 Pro II.
Counter Strike: Source
Lastly I benchmarked with Counter Strike: Source which is now available for everyone to buy and play. Again we see the Albatron K8X800 Pro II doing better than the Gigabyte K8NS Pro.
Overclocking
Unfortunately due to the fact that the Athlon64 that I use for testing isn’t an overclocker I was not able to do much overclocking. I got my processor right when the 3200+ came out and were using the Clawhammer core. I got poor overclocking results with this same processor on another board and at that time thought it was the other motherboard.
I have read one other review of this motherboard and they were able to get a very high overclock using a 3400+ Newcastle core. I have also read a lot about the struggles this processor has while trying to be overclocked. I didn’t think that my processor would have lacked the overclockabilty so I must apologize to you for that.
I know the review is somewhat incomplete without a proper overclocking section but I do not want to post the results that I got due to the fact that it is my processor not the motherboard. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments about this as I would love to hear them.
Conclusion
With AMD offering both socket 754 and 939 processors now and the prices slowly starting to drop a new AMD system is easily in reach. Though I was not able to test the overclockability like I would have I am confident that with a good processor, memory, and cooling that this board could do wonders.
The benchmarks were a little lower than the Albatron K8X800 Pro II that I tested this board against but the results were very close. With this motherboard having so many great onboard features such as 8 channel audio, gigabit LAN, and firewire it practically makes for a complete setup.
Since the BIOS is multi-lingual it will benefit many people who don’t speak English while the dual BIOS feature eliminates the frustration of a bad flash. Taking everything into consideration looked at in this review I am going to give this motherboard an 8/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Gigabyte for making this review possible.
Pros
- Good overall layout
- A plethora of memory settings
- Chipset heatsink is quiet
- Onboard 7.1 audio, gigabit LAN, & firewire
- Multi-language BIOS
- DDR slots don’t interfere with AGP slot
- SATA and ATA133 IDE RAID
Cons
- Benchmark results slightly lower than expected
