Thursday, May 24, 2001

Additional features

Additional features of the Gigabyte GA-7VTX motherboard include: Wake on LAN, Wake on Modem Ring, PS2 connectors for connecting mice & keyboards, 4 USB ports - two of which are located on the back panel, an integrated AC"97 sound-card supported by a CT5880 chip, Power Lost Recovery, Suspend to RAM, RX/TX connectors for infrared, and start-up from the mouse, keyboard, or at a pre-set time.

Hardware monitoring of fan speed, CPU temperature, and of voltages is also included as a standard feature of this PC99-compliant motherboard.

Finally, a secondary BIOS is included, which allows users to reflash the primary in case of a viral attack.

Below, a photo of the Gigabyte GA-7VTX.

Click here for a larger image

Installation

Installation is a bit more complex than usual, due to the large number of jumpers & Dips present on the board itself. That said, the board we received is a pre-release model, so it's quite likely that the final version will see most of the jumper functionalities moved into the BIOS.

The software bundle

The installation CD includes the VIA 4-in-1 version 4.29 drivers, the CT5880 sound-card drivers, a utility for monitoring the hardware under Windows, a program for flashing the BIOS, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Norton Antivirus 2001, Norton Firewall 2001, DirectX 8, and several other utilities including Easy Tune III, Intel LCDM version 6.00.5, Mainboard DMI Viewer, and others.

The hardware bundle

The GA-7VTX comes with: one 80-pin ATA66/100 cable, a floppy-drive cable, and a connector for setting up two additional USB ports on the rear of one's computer casing.

Next: Specifications.