Intel announces DDR333 Chipsets: 3-way 845PE shootout

Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra: Stress Testing

We ran a massive amount of stress tests on the Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra. Just like with the Albatron PX845PEV Pro, we tested this board in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 163MHz.
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz with all banks filled and at 400MHz with all banks filled. We used the most aggressive timings possible.

The Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra was able to sustain stress tests up to 163MHz FSB. Running at this speed, the board was stabile while running Prime95 torture tests for hours at a time (approximately 16 hours). We rerun our most intensive benchmarks (like SPECviewperf) over and over again, in addition to more Prime95 torture tests. Still, no signs of malfunction were detectable at 163MHz FSB. Overall we can say that we were impressed with these results.

The Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra wasn't nearly as impressive in the memory department however. While running one stick of memory at 333MHz was a walk in the park, running just two modules at 333MHz was absolutely impossible no matter what DRAM timings were used. After much trial and error, the best we were able to accomplish was two sticks of memory (double-side Corsair XMS CAS2 DDR400) at 266MHz at the following timings:

These are the most aggressive timings possible via the BIOS, but the fact that we had to underclock the memory to 266MHz puts a damper on these "aggressive" memory timings. Not being able to run more than 1 bank of DDR333 SDRAM is unacceptable, especially for a board that boasts official DDR333 support.

One bright spot of the 8PE667 Ultra's memory performance was its ability to run one stick of memory at 400MHz. Granted this was only possible with one module installed, but considering that neither Gigabyte nor Intel support DDR400 operation for this motherboard, it's pretty impressive.

These settings are very good for DDR400 memory. Too bad we were unable to operate the board at these settings with more than one memory module installed.