Gigabyte GA-7DX
Board Revision: 2.3
BIOS Version: F3 (May 24, 2001)
Company Info
Shipping up to a million motherboards a month, Gigabyte belongs to the global Top 5 motherboard companies.
Hardware Features
We already mentioned it in the first AMD760 review: The 7DX is a typical OEM board, as it comes with decent features, but without expensive components. There are five PCI slots, AGP 4x with AGP lock system, two DIMM sockets and AC97 sound with two line-ins. That's basically what OEM boards require. Different from FIC, Gigabyte merely uses switching voltage regulators (see upper middle in the image).
Gigabyte does not provide any option to change the CPU multiplier ratio - neither in hardware nor in the BIOS.
BIOS
As most other boards, Gigabyte uses a standard Award/Phoenix BIOS. Voltage and fan monitoring is supported.
Configuration And Manual
There is nothing to configure on this motherboard, as there is no way to change the clock speed settings. Every Athlon or Duron CPU will only run at its default settings. That may also be an advantage, since you won't be able to make any configuration mistakes.
The manual looks comprehensive, but does not go into detail very much. All BIOS items are merely mentioned and possible values are simply listed, with no further explanation.
Test & Performance
Even the latest BIOS update (May 24) did not increase the performance of this motherboard. Therefore it can be found on last position in almost all benchmarks. This is quite strange, since the bigger brother GA-7DXR is one of the fastest boards in the test bed.
Shipment
Gigabyte ships one 80-pin IDE cable, a floppy cable, a driver disc, and a manual. A USB cable for the ports 3 and 4 is missing.
