Posted on Wednesday, September 18 2002 @ 9:42 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
[H]ardOCP has reviewed Gigabyte's GA-8IHXP motherboard :
Gigabyte has put a very good package together overall. This board is feature packed; they managed to squeeze as many features as they could onto this board. There is no question that right now the i850E with PC1066 RAMBUS is one of the top performing platforms there is for the consumer right now. The 8IHXP supports all of this plus support for the memory stick interface and secure digital interface as well as smart card. The choice to include the ICH4 as the ‘Southbridge’ was a welcome one as it provides native USB 2.0 support on this motherboard. Coupled with the NEC chip allows a total of 10 USB 2.0 ports right out of the box ready to go! The inclusion of 6 full PCI slots is also very welcome as some manufacturers sacrifice a PCI slot or two to save space and add more. Promise onboard RAID just adds to the overall expandability of this motherboard. And the fact that you can select weather the Promise chip acts as a regular ATA controller or a RAID controller is a VERY welcomed feature. As we all many Promise add on chips in the past were crippled to on work as a RAID controller, but not any longer. Of course onboard Ethernet is almost becoming a given and is certainly great to have especially if you are PCI slot hungry.
