GA-8KNXP vs P4P800 Deluxe.....

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stuart Chapman
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Stuart Chapman

Hi all...

These are the 2 motherboards I'm considering for a new system.

The Gigabyte is A$90 more than the Asus. What are your thoughts on these
boards? Specifically, is the Gigabyte worth the extra $$$??

Stupot
 
The difference?

8KNXP is Canterwood - Intel 875 chipset, the P4P800 is Intel 865.
The former has gigabit ethernet + ECC RAM capabilities.
The 8KNXP has also the ITE (Gigaraid) controller.

In terms of performance your would never notice the difference. The only
issues there may be for you are your needs to for extras on the Gigabyte
board.

I know resellers / assemblers who only build using the 875 chipset on
request since there is so little benefit to most people in the extras. IE
they use the P4P800 in preference.

That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus. The
choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the same
reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.

- Tim
 
These are the 2 motherboards I'm considering for a new system.
The Gigabyte is A$90 more than the Asus. What are your thoughts on these
boards? Specifically, is the Gigabyte worth the extra $$$??
Click to expand...


I'm the owner of an 8KNXP. I really like the board's features
(especially the IDE RAID), and that was my primary motivation for
buying it. Unfortunately, my first 8KNXP randomly died after ~8
months of otherwise perfect use. I received a replacement (RMA) board
(another 8KNXP v1) in about ~2 weeks.

The replacement, like the original, feels fast, and generally runs
well. (There doesn't appear to be any major sign of impending doom.)
I would, however, point out a few of the issues that I've noticed:


1) The PC speaker beeps randomly, despite the fact that the fan and
temperature fail warnings are turned off, and temperatures are easily
within spec. Solution: I had to unplug the PC speaker. (Gigabyte
tech support claimed to have never heard of this problem before. No
pun intended. ;)

2) The Northbridge fan tends to be quite loud. It often "grinds" with
a horrific "death wail" on start-up. The noise does go away after a
while, but I wouldn't be surprised if the fan one day stops spinning.
Why the 8KNXP comes with a NB fan when most of the other major vendors
use passive cooling is beyond me.

3) There have been a number of discussions about various memory
incompatibilities with the 8KNXP (and especially older BIOS releases).
I must admit that I've never had any problems -- I run a
dual-channel, 1GB OCZ PC3200 EL RAM setup with 2-6-3-2 timing, and
everything's great. Supposedly, the 8KNXP version 2 board (which is
probably what you would receive if you bought one new) has cleared up
a number of these problems. But, like I said, I've never had any
problems in this regard.

4) The "spontaneous" failure of my first board doesn't seem to be a
one-time thing: there have been a number of posts in this newsgroup
from people experiencing similar difficulties. (There was no evidence
of failure -- no leaky capacitors, no stopped fans ... The system
simply would not boot or post.) That makes me very suspicious of the
quality of the product, as a whole. (I mean, failure after the first
few days or weeks -- sure, I can accept that. Failure during a bout
of heavy CPU-intensive usage -- sure, I can accept that, too. But in
my case, it was a random failure when the system was essentially idle
for a few hours -- sheesh.)


All told, my 8KNXP is my first -- and definitely last -- Gigabyte
product for some time. My next board will be from Asus -- I've never
had these kinds of problems (nor heard of any of my friends/colleagues
having problems) with that brand.
 
Kris said:
I'm the owner of an 8KNXP. I really like the board's features
(especially the IDE RAID), and that was my primary motivation for
buying it. Unfortunately, my first 8KNXP randomly died after ~8
months of otherwise perfect use. I received a replacement (RMA) board
(another 8KNXP v1) in about ~2 weeks.

The replacement, like the original, feels fast, and generally runs
well. (There doesn't appear to be any major sign of impending doom.)
I would, however, point out a few of the issues that I've noticed:


1) The PC speaker beeps randomly, despite the fact that the fan and
temperature fail warnings are turned off, and temperatures are easily
within spec. Solution: I had to unplug the PC speaker. (Gigabyte
tech support claimed to have never heard of this problem before. No
pun intended. ;)

2) The Northbridge fan tends to be quite loud. It often "grinds" with
a horrific "death wail" on start-up. The noise does go away after a
while, but I wouldn't be surprised if the fan one day stops spinning.
Why the 8KNXP comes with a NB fan when most of the other major vendors
use passive cooling is beyond me.

3) There have been a number of discussions about various memory
incompatibilities with the 8KNXP (and especially older BIOS releases).
I must admit that I've never had any problems -- I run a
dual-channel, 1GB OCZ PC3200 EL RAM setup with 2-6-3-2 timing, and
everything's great. Supposedly, the 8KNXP version 2 board (which is
probably what you would receive if you bought one new) has cleared up
a number of these problems. But, like I said, I've never had any
problems in this regard.

4) The "spontaneous" failure of my first board doesn't seem to be a
one-time thing: there have been a number of posts in this newsgroup
from people experiencing similar difficulties. (There was no evidence
of failure -- no leaky capacitors, no stopped fans ... The system
simply would not boot or post.) That makes me very suspicious of the
quality of the product, as a whole. (I mean, failure after the first
few days or weeks -- sure, I can accept that. Failure during a bout
of heavy CPU-intensive usage -- sure, I can accept that, too. But in
my case, it was a random failure when the system was essentially idle
for a few hours -- sheesh.)


All told, my 8KNXP is my first -- and definitely last -- Gigabyte
product for some time. My next board will be from Asus -- I've never
had these kinds of problems (nor heard of any of my friends/colleagues
having problems) with that brand.
Click to expand...

Everybody has his/her own story.

I bought an Asus P4P800 Deluxe Rev.1.02 which died suddenly, silently,
and unexpectedly after about two months. I sent it back to the dealer.
As a 'bridge', I bought an Asus P4P800 Rev.2.0 which works fine till
today (for about nine months now).
From my dealer I got a replacement for the Deluxe board: a P4P800
Deluxe - unfortunately the same Rev.1.02 - after about six months of
brave work, it died yesterday, silently, and unexpectedly.
Today, I bought a GA-8IPE1000G...

Roy
 
Tim said:
The difference?

8KNXP is Canterwood - Intel 875 chipset, the P4P800 is Intel 865.
The former has gigabit ethernet + ECC RAM capabilities.
The 8KNXP has also the ITE (Gigaraid) controller.

In terms of performance your would never notice the difference. The only
issues there may be for you are your needs to for extras on the Gigabyte
board.

I know resellers / assemblers who only build using the 875 chipset on
request since there is so little benefit to most people in the extras. IE
they use the P4P800 in preference.

That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus. The
choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the same
reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.

- Tim
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tips...

I was leaning towards the ASUS, as I suspected the 875 chipset would have
little noticeable effect on prformance.

Interesting hearing about the reliability issues....

Stupot
 
Tim said:
The difference?

8KNXP is Canterwood - Intel 875 chipset, the P4P800 is Intel 865.
The former has gigabit ethernet + ECC RAM capabilities.
The 8KNXP has also the ITE (Gigaraid) controller.

In terms of performance your would never notice the difference. The only
issues there may be for you are your needs to for extras on the Gigabyte
board.

I know resellers / assemblers who only build using the 875 chipset on
request since there is so little benefit to most people in the extras. IE
they use the P4P800 in preference.

That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus. The
choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the same
reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.

- Tim
Click to expand...

Over the past 2 years i have built 7 different Gigabyte systems all of which
are still runing now with no issues, 2 were the KNXP version 1 and 2.
Gigabyte boards are known for their high quality and features.
Tech support from all the manufactures is just about non existant so your are
on your own when building a system. DOUG
 
Roy Coorne said:
Everybody has his/her own story.

I bought an Asus P4P800 Deluxe Rev.1.02 which died suddenly, silently,
and unexpectedly after about two months. I sent it back to the dealer.
As a 'bridge', I bought an Asus P4P800 Rev.2.0 which works fine till
today (for about nine months now).
From my dealer I got a replacement for the Deluxe board: a P4P800
Deluxe - unfortunately the same Rev.1.02 - after about six months of
brave work, it died yesterday, silently, and unexpectedly.
Today, I bought a GA-8IPE1000G...

Roy
Click to expand...

I've had my 8KNXP since July 03 and haven't had a single hiccup.
It has 2 hdd (SATA) and 3 optical drives hanging off it (DVD-R, DVD-ROM,
CD-R/RW)
and 1 gig of ram to make life interesting and hasn't put a foot wrong ever.

I couldn't imagine myself without this system, ever reliable.

I thought you need to hear this as Kris didn't have a good experience
and went to great lengths to tell you so. I have the system running all
weekend
and many hours every weeknight and the fans don't sound any louder now than
11 months ago.

I have a Rev. 1. board, still running original drivers, haven't updated
anything other than XP and sounding like a broken record, it runs as well as
I could hope for.
Well worth the money I paid for it back then.

Phil.
 
Same here, I have a rev 2 board. And to boot, I just completed setting up
my first raid and had absolutely NO idea WTF I was doing and not only did it
work, it was easy:-)

She's clocked to 3.5(it's a 2.8 chip)with some cheap kingston ram(DDR)and
some rather aggressive memory timing settings and the only time the screen
goes blank is when I shut it off:-)

I've had Asus, Abit, Asus, Soyo, Intel and now Gig....and imho, there's good
and bad in all of them. After my little (time) experience, I stay away from
Soyo.

Don
 
Tim said:
That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus. The
choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the same
reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.
Click to expand...

I must disagree with some of your points with respect given to your
experiences. First, I selected the 8KNXP Rev. 1 one year ago almost to the
day, and it is not only still running but has only crashed in XP Pro once,
this considering the fact that it is used in a home-based business that
requires it to be powered-up 18 hours per day, seven days per week, and in
actual use much of that time. This inauspicious occasion occurred while I
was attempting to position the bios settings for XP to accept the ICH5R SATA
controller, previously disabled, but that situation was quickly corrected.

As for Asus vs. GB and bios issues, if I had to pick one board at this time
it would be the GB. I installed a P4C800 in a friend's computer, mostly
because of price, and quickly ran into problem with its AMI bios that would
arbitrarily rearrange the boot-drive sequence without human input when
detaching IDE drives connected intermittently through a Mobil Rack. It
caused so much trouble that I had to install a PCI IDE controller to
circumvent the main bios, wresting control of the IDE drives away from the
bios. This was not an isolated issue, as when I inquired on an Asus
newsgroup I received lots of commiseration from others who had gone through
the same problems. I'll take the Award bios any day, and I've never had
trouble with f5, f6, or f9 on this Rev 1 board--the only versions I've used
to date.

This person plus another friend who also owns a P4C800 are both happy with
their boards, even though one experienced a fatal failure requiring a
replacement, but if I had to build another system for myself today it'd be a
Rev 2 8KNXP. I have reason to believe it is better than the Rev 1, but if
it is only as good, that would be good enough.
 
That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus. The
choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the same
reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.
Click to expand...

I must disagree with some of your points with respect given to your
experiences. First, I selected the 8KNXP Rev. 1 one year ago almost to the
day, and it is not only still running but has only crashed in XP Pro once,
this considering the fact that it is used in a home-based business that
requires it to be powered-up 18 hours per day, seven days per week, and in
actual use much of that time. This inauspicious occasion occurred while I
was attempting to position the bios settings for XP to accept the ICH5R SATA
controller, previously disabled, but that situation was quickly corrected.

As for Asus vs. GB and bios issues, if I had to pick one board at this time
it would be the GB. I installed a P4C800 in a friend's computer, mostly
because of price, and quickly ran into problem with its AMI bios that would
arbitrarily rearrange the boot-drive sequence without human input when
detaching IDE drives connected intermittently through a Mobil Rack. It
caused so much trouble that I had to install a PCI IDE controller to
circumvent the main bios, wresting control of the IDE drives away from the
bios. This was not an isolated issue, as when I inquired on an Asus
newsgroup I received lots of commiseration from others who had gone through
the same problems. I'll take the Award bios any day, and I've never had
trouble with f5, f6, or f9 on this Rev 1 board--the only versions I've used
to date.

This person plus another friend who also owns a P4C800 are both happy with
their boards, even though one experienced a fatal failure requiring a
replacement, but if I had to build another system for myself today it'd be a
Rev 2 8KNXP. I have reason to believe it is better than the Rev 1, but if
it is only as good, that would be good enough.

Not only is the Gigabyte bios better than the Asus,it has 2 of them.
The Asus bios is what kept me from buying one. I built a revision 1 KNXP
for my nephew that he uses for video editing a year ago and it has been solid a
a rock,i have the revision 2 that has been running 24 hours a day for over a
year. DOUG
 
Hi,

My comments were based on experience. I purchased the 8knxp referred to at
about the same time as Bob. The conversations of the day (nearly a year ago)
were around getting stability with the F5 and later F6 bios. There was very
considerable discussion on this to the point where one site I made reference
to had 27 pages of conversation thread on the issues around getting systems
stable from the memory perspective only. There were even representatives
from the memory manufacturers monitoring the newsgroups to see what positive
advice they could give and also to keep things straight.

GB was not alone on this front - all manufacturers seemed to have troubles
with the 865 and 875 chipset.

My comments reflected the fact that it took quite some time for GB to
produce bios F6 - several months. There were multiple versions of the beta
bios's that floated around that many people tried and slowly but surely
reported progress with. When bios F6 finally arrived, his largely sorted the
issue out. However there were still considerable issues with disc drive
detection in particular SATA drives not appearing in the bios at all,
corrupt bios display strings and corruption in general requiring clearing
cmos. This was when they decided that it was a good idea to initialise the
on board controller bios's prior to entering setup that caused some people
to fret - without this the bios could not display the drives on these
controllers and so get the boot order specification right. This did not work
well in bios F6 at all. After some further months, bios F7 came and went
very quickly as did F8 while F9 hung around a bit longer than either of
those two. Finally bios F10 did arrive and in that version things were / are
largely correct.

To compare this history with the asus - and to put Bob's experience into
perspective a little, by comparison asus had most of these issues sorted in
considerably less time that GB. IE the interval between each bios version
was considerably less along with the stickability of each version.
Basically, from day 1 with Asus, by comparison I had no issues. Certainly
Bob did have the issue with swapping IDE discs in drive bays. All the asus
P4P and P4C systems I have installed have been running 24 x 7 without issues
apart from one system that had a RAID 1 disc fault - nothing to do with the
mobo.

So yes, at the end of the day I have no qualms about the reliability of the
electronics on the 8KNXP. My systems run 24 x 7 as do my customers, so as
people that see me post will know I always run RAID 1 and seek reliability
before all else (IE placing System on RAID 0).

Basically, I think a more beneficial statement may be to list the mobo's
that people would be foolish to touch. The 8knxp is a good mobo. Rev 2 is
according to others different only in the sound chip, and Prescott CPU's are
dead in the water... If you want a future get an AMD64 bit :)

I stated it a long time ago: a dual bios is useless if there is no stable
bios available. I had never needed to clear cmos prior to the 8knxp, and
prior to this fiasco would never have seen a benefit in a dual bios. Now I
know why they are needed. Give me 1 reliable bios from day 1 and i will be
happy.

- Tim
 
I stated it a long time ago: a dual bios is useless if there is no >Now I
know why they are needed. Give me 1 reliable bios from day 1 and i >will be
happy.
Click to expand...
- Tim
Click to expand...


When a bios has failed flash and rendered it unusable,the back up bios sure
was nice to have,happened on the first RXP board that i built. The Version 1
KNXP i built for my nephew that is used for video editing and creation is using
the F5 bios,with 1 ATA system drive, 1 SATA editing drive and Maxtor USB
external back up drive.
The 875 is a superior chipset to the 865,which only advantage is it being
cheaper. DOUG
 
Hello All

I currently have a 8KNXP Rev 2 board and it has been very stable for some
months now. Originally I had 4 Rev 1 boards that all failed in quick
succession. I was also using Corsair RAM which I do not think the Rev 1
board worked well with at all. I do also believe that the BIOS upgrades for
the Rev 2 have also fixed some small issues. As you can see I run a lot of
gear on this PC and it is rock solid. The main reason I chose the GB board
originally is because of the extra features it had like the ITE IDE
controller, full powered USB2 and FireWire ports for connection to me case
(I use a 2.5" USB2/FW external drive which uses bus power) etc.

Cheers
Mark

This is my rig:
Giga-Byte GA-8KNXP v.2.0 Motherboard w/ Award BIOS v. FH
Pentium 4 3.0 w/800 MHz FSB Intel 875P Chipset - HT & PAT enabled
1GB Corsair PC3200 (@ 2.8v (2.5,3,3,6) - Read 4800 MB/s, Write 1500 MB/s
(AIDA32 V3.90)
2 Seagate 120 GB SATA Hard Drives (RAID 1)
RAID 1 on Intel ICH5R (v3.5.0.2568)
Western Digital 200 GB PATA Hard Drive (IDE 3 - Master ITE Controller)
ASUS V9560 FX5600 - AGP 8x 128MB DDR Video Card VIVO (Nvidia v.56.76)
Lite-On 52x32x52 CDR-W (IDE 1 Master)
Panasonic LS-120 Drive (IDE 1 Slave)
Pioneer DVR-107D 8x DVD Writer (IDE 2 Master)
Iomega ZIP 250 MB Drive (IDE 2 Slave)
Pioneer DVD-120 DVD-ROM drive (IDE 4 - Master ITE Controller)
Sony DR-510 DVD-RW Drive (Firewire port)
External 80 GB USB 2.0 Drive
Yamaha AP-U70 External USB Amplifier
TDK Tremor 180 watt speakers
Thermaltake Xaser III Case
Thermaltake 480 watt ATX Power Supply
Hitachi 17" LCD Monitor (1280 x 1024)
Win XP Pro SP-1a O.E.M.
 
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