• Overview

• Software

• Motherboard Features

• Motherboard Specifications

• Useful links

Firstly let me say that I will be looking at all the features available for this motherboard. That means that I am basically looking at the Ultra version of this motherboard. The other two versions are the original GA-8VT880 and the GA-8VT880-L. Here is a quick table showing you the differences in the 3 models.

As you can see the Differences are in the presence and speed of the LAN chip and the availability of the IDE GigaRAID. All the other features are available on all three versions of the board.

The chipset for this board is VIA's PT880, for the Pentium 4, socket 478 platform. Features include Serial ATA supported by the south bridge, Dual channel DDR memory bus for memory speeds twice as fast as other DDR400 capable boards and chipsets. This chipset and board combination allows you to have a maximum of 4Gb of memory. This is a really decent amount as some boards only offer a 2Gb max on the memory front.

Like all of the best Giga-byte boards it does come with the extremely useful Dual BIOS. Having a backup BIOS is more important than some of you may realise. A second BIOS could effectively save your motherboard. Virus' can wipe out a BIOS, they can die from time to time and they can be wiped by a bad BIOS flash. With a backup BIOS you are given a second chance.

The Giga-byte offering in the PT880 chipset department is solid if not lightning quick. The benchmarks show that its not the quickest on any test however it does seem that the board was built for a solid and stable performance and that's what your likely to get out of it. If your looking for overclocking you may want to look at the ABIT or ASUS solutions.

Software

The CIA is Giga-bytes CPU Intelligent Accelerator. This little utility will detect the amount of load the CPU is under when applications and games are loaded and executed. It will then intelligently adjust the performance of the CPU to the required level. The application will then get a CPU performance boost at the time its most needed. This way programs will start faster. And when they are terminated the CPU will return to its previous state.

Easytune 4 is Giga-bytes overclocking facility. Every manufacturer now seems to ship with a software overclocker. Like all the others Easytune allows you to overclock your CPU, FSB and voltages to get a performance boost out of your system. As always use caution when overclocking your system as it can cause permanent damage in some circumstances.

Motherboard Features

This motherboard supports Hyper-Threading from Intel. This technology allows for better use of CPU resources when multitasking or when multi-threading applications are used. It allows process threads to be executed in parallel (at the same time) rather than in serial (one behind another).

Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything.

The PT880 chipset comes complete with two independent memory controllers. This gives you twice the access bandwidth to the memory than before. The Duel Channel Memory Bus allows twice the data to be transferred per second than the previous DDR400 chipsets. Speeds can reach up to 6.4GB/s

USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.

Serial ATA is the new way of connecting your Hard drives to your Motherboard. The current Serial ATA specification is ATA-150 (150Mb/s). The GA-8VT880 supports 2 S-ATA with support for RAID 0 and 1 check out more on what RAID does here. To use Serial ATA you will need Hard Disk Drives that have the Serial ATA connector.

A complete solution for storage. 4 IDE ports supports up to 8 devices giving a perfect RAID solution for RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1. This complete solution gives you complete control and options for a secure system and a fast access system. Learn more on RAID here

The IEEE 1394 Firewire port allows for lightning fast communication for Audio / Visual peripherals. This is perfect for connecting peripherals such as a video recorder as even the slowest of the IEEE 1394 standards can transmit a video recording of 30 frames per second uninterrupted to your PC. Speeds can reach up to 1.2Gbits/s with the new 2002 standard.

Motherboard Specifications

Useful Links