Gigabyte 8I955X Royal layout and features
Gigabyte's a fan of colour-coded layouts. You'll either love it or hate it, although it does it make it easy to spot various ports and sockets easily. How on earth could one miss the lime-coloured IDE ports on the left-hand side.
One of the Royal's more interesting features is orange slot that's reserved for Gigabyte's U-Plus DPS (Dual Power System) system. Once the additional (and supplied) U-PLUS board is plugged, the Royal is transformed into a motherboard featuring 8-phase power circuitry. Gigabyte reckons that it adds further stability when the motherboard is overclocked and overvolted, and the heatpipe design is helped by the airflow generated by the CPU's fan. We'll have to see just how well it fares against the others in our overclocking tests. The U-PLUS DPS board is designed to fit around a reference heatsink, and we can see no problem if you're inclined to use larger aftermarket coolers, too.
Note the four blue LEDs on the U-Plus DPS? They serve as a rudimentary troubleshooting guide during the POST sequence. The 4-pin power connector is located close to the power-delivery system. It makes the contact shorter but also makes installation a little messier, as you have to place the cable around the CPU's heatsink.
Gigabyte opts for a passively cooled heatsink, and a large one at that, which seems to be the norm for i955X boards. It's not large enough, however, to cause problems when installing or removing a reference heatsink.
Floppy, a single IDE, which is common on all i955X boards, and the main 24-pin power connector are all sensibly located, just below the 4 DDR2-compatible RAM slots which are located high enough to allow RAM installation/removal without having to remove the PCI-Express card. The i955X chipset is designed with performance in mind, and our benchmarks have shown it to be up to 5% faster than Intel's very own i945P. Unlike ABIT's offering, Gigabyte only offers 3 usable fan headers on its Royal.
Moving on further to the left, we see the ICH7R southbridge hidden underneath another passive heatsink. The standard 4 SATA2 ports are arranged alongside Gigabyte's tried-and-trusted Dual BIOS setup that's been present on high-end boards for some time now. Once the system is powered up the board checks both BIOSes for integrity. If the primary one fails the secondary one is activated and the user is given the option of fixing the first or continue booting with the backup. We suppose it's also handy when the primary one is flashed with a newer BIOS. No more crossing fingers time!
The Gigabyte 8I955X Royal focus on storage flexibility is evidenced by the use of an ITE IT8212F ASIC which offers IDE-based RAID in 0/1/0+1 flavours. You just need to look next door to see where the accompanying ports are, and one can add up to 4 drives in addition to the 4 SATA-driven off the ICH7R's southbridge.
The board's 2 x1 PCIe slots are located in a sensible position, right below 3 regular PCI slots. However, we reckon that Gigabyte could have done a better job of locating the extra 2 SATA2 ports run off the now-ubiquitous Silicon Image Sil3112A controller. The ports, we feel, should have been nearer the on-chip variety, thus making it easier to connect a number of drives without have to stretch cables. Also, if one decides to use the lower x1 PCIe slot, then cable connection is a slight worry. It's of no surprise that Gigabyte uses the same Texas Instruments FireWire ASICs as ABIT does, and you can see them to the right of the above picture.
More similarities exist in the choice of audio CODEC that's used to route the ICH7R's sound to the speaker ports. Realtek's ALC882M is sufficiently capable for Gigabyte to proclaim Dolby Master Studio certification for the Royal. The Royal also features dual Gigabit PCIe Ethernet, although Gigabyte uses a couple of slightly older BCM5751 ASICs.
A pretty busy-looking I/O section here. There's both coaxial and optical S/PDIF-out, old world LPT and COM connections. High-speed connectivity, on the backplane at least, is left to 4x USB 2.0 ports. We expect to see dual RJ45 ports, servicing the board's dual PCIe Gigabit Ethernet ASICs. Rounding it off here are 6 speaker ports, which offer up to 7.1-channel sound.
We're impressed by the total number of features the Gigabyte 8I955X Royal carries, although, we reckon, the layout could do with just a slight refinement. No major issues, however.
