The Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW has been an interesting platform to say the least. Having passed the stability-testing phase we headed into the benchmarking session only to find that it was unable to complete the Business Winstone 2001 benchmark. With this weighing on our minds we completed the rest of the benchmarks without a hitch. During the entire period the platform ran flawlessly. No other issues have been noted to this point but the overall performance is a bit on the conservative side.
Boosting Performance
Gigabyte has given us the opportunity to boost our performance two ways with the GA-7DPXDW. The first would be the overclocking of the platform via preset FSB settings in the Bios. For our set of processors the options were 133/33, 135/34, 136/34, 138/34, 140/35, 144/36, 146/36 and finally 150/37. Our other option is to utilize the Promise RAID Controller. Due to the fact that this is the first platform that I have tested with the onboard IDE RAID I have decided to complete our round of testing by implementing the Promise RAID and stripping four 7200-rpm 40GB Maxtor harddrives together. The following graphs show the difference made by the Stripped Raid configuration. The system's bus/memory speeds remained set to the defaults of 133/133Mhz.
With the Promise RAID controller enabled we went into the controllers Bios and configured our drives. It should be noted that this is NOT the lite version of the Promise RAID Controller and that it will support all four drives in stripped Raid-0 in configuration.
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Notice anything about the above picture? Yep, this picture was taken while one of the rounded cables had unplugged a drive.
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With the RAID configured it is time to install the OS. Installation of the OS was quick but you have to remember to create a driver disk for the Promise RAID controller. When prompted by the OS about third party/other drivers press F6 and the installer will load the Promise Drivers from the floppy. With that taken care of the rest of the OS install is a breeze and appeared to a good bit quicker. I reinstalled all the drivers and associated patches/updates. With the system up and running once again we head into the benchmarks. Below are the complete results of the system benchmarks while running the Promise RAID controller. To keep things simple the results are displayed in a simple gallery format. My comments about the results are listed below the gallery.
