Monday, May 24, 1999

Introduction

No, the socket 7 motherboards are really not dead despite what many peoples cant think ! This really well designed product, the Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4, is another proof that socket 7 motherboards are going to continue to be available for a long period of time again. With the GA-5AX Super 7 motherboard, Gigabyte has chosen to use a combination of Dip switches and jumpers to set the operating condition for the processor for a maximum of flexibility. This motherboard is based on the Ali Aladin V chipset and it comes with 512Kb pipelined burst sync. L2 cache. It offers full support for every K6-2 and K6-3 up to 500Mhz and/or faster when available as well as support for Cyrix and IDT processors. Let's have a closer look at this motherboard in the following review I wrote for you.

The Features

The GA-5AX rev 4 is a 5/2/1 motherboard meaning by there that there are 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, 1 AGP port as it can be found on most of the motherboards nowadays. There are also 3 168 pins DIMM memory sockets to allow up to 768Mb os main memory to be installed. Most of the PCI and ISA connectors can use full length cards as only the second ISA slot shared with the fist PCI slot is refraining the use of full length cards because of the front panel accessories connectors.

The clock frequencies are spanning from 66Mhz to 140Mhz including: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 105Mhz, 110Mhz, 115Mhz, 120Mhz, 125Mhz,130Mhz, 135Mhz and 140Mhz.

The clock multipliers can be set from 1.5X to 5.5X in steps of .5X. The processor core voltage can be adjusted from 1.3 up to 3.5 volts in steps of .1 volt on this motherboard.

As you can see, you can get every ounces of power from your processor with this motherboard as there are plenty of Overclocking possibilities offered.

Additional features such as: Wake on LAN, PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, USB connectors, Keyboard power-on, Wake up on modem ring, CPU Over Heat Protection.

Below, we have a good picture of the Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4 motherboard and its components layout;

Installation

The installation of this motherboard is not very complicated but juts a tad more than a Jumperless motherboard.

There are jumpers to set for the processor voltage and Dip switches to set the clock frequency and multiplier. All in all, in takes less than 5 minutes to set the motherboard ready to work for the processor you wish to use as everything is very well covered in the users manual.

The Software Bundle

The software bundle of the GA-5AX rev 4 includes: Ali Bus master drivers, Ali AGP drivers, LCDM 3.11, DirectX 6 for Win95/98 from Microsoft, Acrobat Reader Ver.3.01 from Adobe, PC-cillin 98 OEM Setup Ver.4.02 from Trend, XStore Pro Bus Master IDE Driver Ver.120 for All Chipsets.

Continue on next page with The performance tests results