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I'll just quickly run over setup notes and oddities before we move on to the test setup and pretty benchmark graphs.
It was actually an unflustered affair testing all these boards. The same chipset on all meant recreating the test setup accurately on each board was a piece of cake, provided the board behaved itself. It's therefore a miracle that only one board misbehaved and it was only the 2nd board on the rack for performance testing. Stand up EPoX EP-8K9A9I and answer the utterly annoying crime of booting up to an FF POST monitor code for the boot following a successful shutdown. More than once I reset your CMOS, thinking you were dead, only to find out that your FF trick was merely standard behaviour. It wasn't funny. I'm sure a BIOS upgrade will cure it, but for me anyway, shutting down would mean the subsequent boot was straight to FF, apparently dead. Turning off the Enermax PSU at its switch and turning back on gave a clean, unfussed and working boot.
No other troubles were encountered. Setting all boards to 11 x 166 for the test processor and 166MHz, CL2, 5-2-2 for the memory was fine. Not the setup and benchmarking nightmare encountered with previous VIA efforts and something I wasn't expecting. Thumbs up for stability during testing and general good behaviour from all boards (when booted), excellent from a testers point of view and hopefully yours too.
Gigabyte's external Serial ATA device
This is the only other thing I want to take a look at and focus on before we move on. It's a little contraption designed to let you run a pair of Serial ATA devices outside of your case. You hook up a pair of Serial ATA cables and a molex connector and it basically mirrors them on an ATX backplate. You can then use a Y power splitter to provide two drives with power from that external port and run them externally. You can think up an intended usage for it, my mind simply wanders to powered Serial ATA enclosures. Here's a picture.
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