Monday, January 08, 2001

Introduction

If there is one thing to be said about the Gigabyte GA-7ZXR motherboard, it's that it makes a great first impression. How could it not? After all, it comes equipped with a RAID ATA100 controller - the Promise Technologies PDC20265 to be precise - and that's something that definitely puts this baby in the same league as the big boys in the server department. Not only that, but our newest contender also comes equipped with DualBIOS technology, a suite of interesting features, and a CT5880 audio chipset that can compete with the Soundblaster PCI-128.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Well, if you happen to agree with that, then please read on and share in our detailled analysis of Gigabyte's GA-7ZXR.

Features

As you can immediately tell from reading the table, the GA-7ZXR is a board of rather broad dimensions. As a result, it takes a pretty large case to house it.

Gigabyte hasn't missed any chances to add some extra panache to the GA-7ZXR, though. In fact, they seem to have started things off by adding two independent drive controllers to their newest offering: one for RAID-compatible ATA100, and one for your ATA66 drives. Thus, users are gifted with immediate support for up to 8 IDE devices.

Gigabyte has also seen fit to include DualBIOS technology with the GA-7ZXR, which means two independent BIOS, and an extra layer of protection against viral infection; if the primary BIOS goes down, the secondary is still ready to go.

As far as configuration goes, however, the GA-7ZXR's BIOS leaves a bit to be desired. Firstly, there are no BIOS options pertaining to the FSB - the FSB frequency itself has to be selected using a series of Dip switches, and there is no option available for setting the clock multiplier. Gigabyte hasn't much more generous in other quarters either. The memory bus, for one, can only be set to operate at 100MHz, or 133MHz, and this pretty effectively limits the user's ability to Overclock their memory. Options are provided that relate to memory addressing and other such functions, but many of them are poorly documented.

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left around the CPU socket, which allows for the installation of large heatsinks.

The memory slots are far enough from the AGP port that there is little chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card.

Seventeen capacitors of a measly 1200Mfd have been placed around the CPU socket. We were expecting better, to say the least...

The CPU retention bar is made of plastic, and needs to be handled with care.

Three fan connectors have been included.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the chipset.

Manual assignment of IRQs is not possible with this board.

It's possible to roll-back the BIOS to the last batch of valid settings by simply holding the "Insert" key at start-up.

Next: Additional features.