Wednesday, August 30, 2000

Introduction

The Gigabyte GA-7ZX motherboard, as you may guess, is a Socket A board implementing the Via KT133 chipset. As such, it comes on the crest of the wave that has brought us the 3rd generation of Athlon motherboards - many examples of which we've seen over the last few months. Benefiting from Dual BIOS technology, among other things, the GA-7ZX offers a range of features - all of which we'll be reviewing for your viewing pleasure.

The features

The Gigabyte GA-7ZX is expandable via its 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, single AGP port, and AMR slot. There are also 3 168-pin DIMM sockets which, together, can support up to 1.5GB of PC100, PC133, or VCM memory.

Configuration of the GA-7ZX is accomplished through a combination of Dip switches, and BIOS functions. On the board itself, we find a block of switches labeled SW1 that allow one to adjust the FSB frequency. The choices available range from 95MHz and 133MHz, and includes: 95MHz, 100MHz, 105MHz, 110MHz, 113MHz, 115MHz, 117MHz, 120MHz and 133MHz.

Unfortunately, no jumper or BIOS function exists for varying the processor's Vcore voltage. What's more, the BIOS does not completely replicate the features offered by the Dips.

As concerns the adjustment of the memory bus, Gigabyte has seen fit only to offer a restrained function for accomplishing that affect. Effectively, the user can choose between memory bus settings of 100MHz, or 133MHz. If the memory bus is set to 133MHz, though, the memory latency cannot be set to 2, rather, it must be set to Auto, or make-do with a latency of 3.

Next: Additional features