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Introduction and Specificaions

Introduction

Along with the new Intel Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition processors there came a requirement for a new chipset to go along with them.  From Intel, this came in the form of the 955X core logic.  We have initially previewed the 955X chipset and compared it to other Intel and AMD-based chipsets in terms of performance and features.

The 955X chipset doesn’t have much more to offer from a technical point of view over the features of the 925X or 925XE chipsets previous to it.  The 955X simply brings support for dual core processors to the Intel chipset line up and was obviously a requirement from Intel if they were to start selling Pentium D CPUs. 

In this review we are going to compare the performance features of the reference board from Intel to this first retail sample we received from Gigabyte based on the same chipset. 

Specifications (from Gigabyte website)

Processor LGA775 Intel® Pentium® D processor Supports 1066/800/533MHz FSB Chipset Northbridge: Intel® 955X Chipset Southbridge: Intel® ICH7R Silicon Image Sil3132 SATA II controller T.I IEEE1394b controller GigaRAID ITE8712 IDE RAID controller 2 x Broadcom 5751 Gigabit Ethernet controller Realtek ALC882M audio codec Memory 4 DDR II DIMM memory slots (supports up to 8GB memory) Supports dual channel DDR II 677/533/400 unbuffered DIMM Supports 1.8V DDR II DIMM Supports 64bit ECC type DRAM integrity mode Internal I/O Connectors 1 x U-Plus D.P.S connector 6 x Serial ATA II 3.0Gb/s connectors 1 x UDMA ATA 100/66/33 connectors 2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 connectors 1 x FDD connector 2 x IEEE1394b connectors (supports 3 ports) 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 connector (supports 4 ports) 3 x Cooling fan pin headers 1 x Game/Midi connector Expansion Slots 1 PCI Express x 16 slot 2 PCI Express x 1 slots 3 PCI slots Rear Panel I/O 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 2 x RJ45 ports 6 x Audio ports (4 x Line-out/ 1 x Line-in/ 1 x MIC) 1 x Coaxial S/P-DIF out 1 x Optical S/P-DIF out PS/2 Keyboard/ Mouse 1 x COM port connector 1 x LPT port Form Factor ATX form factor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm Other Features U-Plus D.P.S DualBIOS C.I.A. 2 M.I.B. 2 R.G.B.

Next Page - Board Layout and Features

Review Index:
- Select - Summary Introduction and Specificaions Board Layout and Features BIOS Features BIOS Features (cont'd) Overclocking and Test Setup Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra, AIDA32 and Cachemem Gaming: Quake III and UT2003 Application: Winstones and WorldBench 5 Application: DivX, MP3 and Data Compression Professional: SPECviewperf 8.0 Scientific: ScienceMark 2.0 Final USB Performance and Power Consumption Conclusions