Gigabyte's GA-8IRXP: The little board that couldn

At the beginning of the year, Gigabyte released the GA- IRXP, a feature-packed motherboard targeted at the enthusiast/overclocker community. It attracted rave reviews at ExtremeTech, Tom's Hardware Guide, Anandtech and many lesser sites. Reviewers made much of its superlative overclockability.

However, in February, numerous visitors to the newsgroup alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte began to report serious problems when overclocking the GA-8IRXP with the Northwood P4 CPU. The factor common to all was the board's inability to shut down and restart Windows while overclocked.

The problem occurred when the CPU voltage (aka Vcore) was changed, even if the change was so small at to be apparently insignificant. So, for example, if you chose the 'Restart' option in Windows, the system would hang while restarting.

The only way out was to pull the power plug. After several BIOS revisions, Gigabyte fixed that problem at the beginning of March.

This is where the story gets good, because that 'fix', in classic whack-a-mole style, introduced another bug. With the new BIOS (version F6), most overclocked GA-8IRXPs would cheerfully reboot Windows all day long. Unfortunately, they would no longer cold boot.

The usual symptoms are: switch on PC, watch it hang in a few seconds later, whereupon it will have to be manually restarted (sometimes it resets itself and restarts at default CPU speed). Following this it will probably run normally until the next power-on cold boot.

More than 80 per cent of visitors to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte who say they have overclocked the GA-8IRXP claim they have problems booting or rebooting it. Of course this figure is skewed - people with a grievance are much more likely to post in newsgroups - but the volume of complaints indicates a significant problem.

Many users are able to overclock their GA-8IRXPs a little, some more than others. Most are happy with the board's other features. And nobody denies that it is capable of running at very impressive overclocked speeds. The central problem [issue, in PCspeak] for the dissatisfied users is that the board cannot be switched on and booted up at those speeds. That's a problem in a product which is explicitly marketed to overclockers.

Faced with these challenging market conditions, Gigabyte apparently decided to cut its losses. An unfortunate UK representative of the company was embarrassed to report in the newsgroups that the company's engineers in Taiwan had been unable to reproduce the latest fault so would make no further effort to fix it.

It's troubling that despite the widespread public discussion of the board's problems in the newsgroups and several other forums, hardware review sites continue to shower it with awards (more than 20 so far - see numerous links on Gigabyte's home page). And the sites that had earlier sung the board's praises remained silent, apparently ignoring email from unhappy owners. So much for rigorous, ethical journalism -- where were the fearless media watchdogs during the overclocking community's hour of need?

Well, on April 15, the online media did finally come to the rescue. The Register ran a story (Gigabyte GA-81RXP: overclocker's nightmare). Following this, Gigabyte's attitude underwent a dramatic change. Within days the company told the Register that it had found the previously undetectable problem and fixed it with a new BIOS update.

The Register announced this feat in a story entitled 'Gigabyte fixes GA-81RXP boot problem'. Other sites picked up the Register's story and spread the good news. GA- 8IRXP owners rejoiced.

But where was the eagerly awaited BIOS update? It couldn't be found on any of Gigabyte's web or ftp sites. It looked like the company's PR department had gamely raced ahead and fixed the bug on paper while the R&D dept still struggled to fix it in reality. In the end it took well over a week for the BIOS fix to appear on Gigabyte's site.

And it didn't work, either - at least not according to all the newsgroup denizens who have tried it so far. In fact, some say, the new BIOS actually attempts to limit overclocking of the board by removing some of the overclocking features that have existed on it since its release. There's been angry talk in the newsgroups of a class action suit. Gigabyte has made no comment, other than to alter the online description of the latest BIOS update so that it no longer claims to fix the startup problem. The company is busy getting ready for the launch of a new version of the board, the GA-8IEXP, based on Intel's 845E chipset, and probably wishes the GA-8IRXP would quietly go away.

If Gigabyte can't fix the fault is there any answer for owners of the faulty boards? One possible solution is to physically join voltage control pins on the CPU, which forces the motherboard to deliver a higher voltage to it - but it's a risky procedure that can cook the CPU if done wrong. Another that works for some is to heat up the voltage regulation components on the motherboard before switching on the computer - keep your hairdryer handy. For some unhappy buyers, however, such makeshift measures just aren't good enough: they've already voted with their feet, and exchanged the boards for products from other manufacturers. µ

See Also
Gigabyte site http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/ GA-8IRXP Wins Anandtech Editor's Choice Award (Dec 17 2001) http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1567&p=22
GA-8IRXP Recommended by Tom's Hardware Guide (Jan 17 and March 18)
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q1/020318/i845ddr- 31.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020117/p4_3000-01.html
GA-8IRXP Recommended by ExtremeTech (Feb 20) http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,apn=26&s=1670&a=22995&app=24&ap=25,00.as!!!!!p
Gigabyte GA-81RXP: overclocker's nightmare http://www.theregus.com/content/54/24636.html
Gigabyte fixes GA-81RXP boot problem http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25024.html