First reports on Gateway 825GM BTX motherboard

Okay, y'all -- you need to thank me for doing this ... to say nothing
of the expense, there is the general PRINCIPAL of having done business
with a proprietary (or at least semi-proprietary) PC maker.

But I just HAD to see how this BTX design performs.

Okay, first, thank goodness, the Intel Desktop Utilities for the 915
chipset did work with this machine.

It reports back that this BTX motherboard is an Intel D915GSE.

Thus far the temperature monitors have been running around 55C with
System Zone 1 around 32C and System Zone 2 around 44C.

Now the System Zone 2 temp seems to be much higher than the System Zone
2 temp from the Intel D915PGN motherboard in the Powerspec 9262,
however I don't think I have really seen a chart pointing out where the
temp sensors are on the BTX motherboards.

The fan speeds at idle are running around 900rpm for the front/thermal
module fan and around 800rpm for the rear fan. These fans can BARELY
be heard at these speeds, as opposed to the CPU fan in the 9262 which
runs around 3600rpm and sounds not terribly dissimilar from a small
drill at times.

I threw the "stress test" at the box from the Intel Desktop Utilities
and the CPU temp ramped up pretty quickly to the 65C range.

I have not had a chance to throw a 2.5 hour video render at this thing
yet though to see how it might perform under sustained load.

What's interesting, however, is that the power draw as measured through
my UPS is only marginally less and this Gateway 825GM has one less hard
drive, 1GB less memory, 1 less soundcard, 1 less FireWire card, etc,
than the current configuration of my Powerspec 9262, so I just wonder
where in the devil this Gateway is dumping all this power and how the
heck a 300 watt power supply keeps this thing running.

So this BTX design DOES look like it has some potential. I just wonder
when Intel might be planning to release some full-sized BTX designs so
we can get ATI Radeon X800 cards and the like into the box without
crashing into all these wind tunnel components.

Ax

On 15 Jan 2005 11:09:14 -0800, axinar DeleteThis @yahoo.com wrote:

 >I threw the "stress test" at the box from the Intel Desktop Utilities
 >and the CPU temp ramped up pretty quickly to the 65C range.

May I know what's your ambient temperature?

 >What's interesting, however, is that the power draw as measured through
 >my UPS is only marginally less and this Gateway 825GM has one less hard
 >drive, 1GB less memory, 1 less soundcard, 1 less FireWire card, etc,
 >than the current configuration of my Powerspec 9262, so I just wonder
 >where in the devil this Gateway is dumping all this power and how the
 >heck a 300 watt power supply keeps this thing running.

AFAIK, a relatively high end system fully decked out with a few
drives, expansion cards and RAM hardly ever passes the 250W mark. So a
properly designed and made 300W shouldn't have any problem with what
you're describing, which probably doesn't cross the 200W mark at all.

The 1 hard drive, 1GB less ram, 1 sound card, 1 firewire wouldn't
affect the power consumption much if you're not actively using them.
Even then, it's not a big amount.

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