Gigabyte X48T-DQ6: Linux On Intel's X48 Chipset

BIOS:

The Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 and its Quad BIOS technology use an Award BIOS. Found inside this BIOS are the standard options one would expect in an enthusiast-grade motherboard, including an array of overclocking features. The CPU host frequency can be adjusted up to 700MHz, variable CPU clock ratio, and voltage controls for the DDR3 memory, PCI-E, FSB, MCH, and CPU. The DDR3 voltage can be pushed in excess of an extra volt while the maximum voltage supported for the Intel CPUs is 2.35V in 0.05V increments. Overclocking isn't our focus at Phoronix, but with the X48T-DQ6 we had no problems pushing an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 to a stable 2.9GHz using air-cooling.

System Setup:

With both Intel's P35 and X38 performing well (as well as the P31), and the X48 only being an incremental update, we hadn't expected any Linux compatibility issues with the Intel X48 Express. Unlike AMD's Spider Platform, using Ubuntu 7.10 we hadn't run into any compatibility issues whatsoever with the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6. The Ubuntu desktop LiveCD had successfully booted and we were quickly into our installation. All of the on-board controllers had properly worked under Linux and we had no stability problems.

For benchmarking the Gigabyte X48 motherboard we had used an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, ASUS Radeon HD 3870 512MB graphics card, and a Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive. On the software side was Ubuntu 7.10 with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and the Catalyst 8.01 Linux driver. Benchmarks had consisted of Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, LAME encoding, timed disk reads, Gzip compression, and RAMspeed.