Fast, Furious and easy to install... (Gigabyte GA-7DXR)

Name: Graham Smith

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Product:	Gigabyte GA-7DXR
Date:	01/10/01 (2286 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy set up, Dual Bios, DDR + Raid

Disadvantages: None found

I am not a 'computer techie' and apart from adding the odd SCSI card, modem and sound card, memory etc. to my ageing P166, I have not ever really been that interested on what's under the hood.

This Board has changed all that.

Going back to university as a mature student meant that I have had to be careful on expenses and therefore I decided to build my own PC from scratch. I researched all the various pages and eventually decided on the Gigabyte GA7 DXR.

Why? I'll tell you. Firstly it has the new DDR (double Data Rate) memory function that means that the Ram is 'Read' on both the rise and fall of the CPU clock. (Still with me)? In effect, P133 memory is 'Doubled' to P266 (whilst still remaining P133). Basically double the speed.

It also has 'Raid' capability - Redundant Array of Inexpensive (independent) Disks. This brings the security of data into the realm of normal PC users and not just Server systems. What you can do is set up two hard disks to act together. Identical data streams will be written to both at the same time and should one ever go 'Bang' you still have your entire data safe on the other. You can just disconnect the 'bad' disk and re-boot with the good one. An obvious advantage if you need to keep data safe - obvious disadvantage - two disks are more expensive than one! You can also set up RAID 0 which streams different 'bits' of data to both disks, in effect splitting the stream into two. This has the effect of speeding up the data transfer to your CPU and is called 'Striping' Again, needs two identical disks. Me? I have one 40gb primary and a slave from the old machine of 8gb, Raid will come later and an Athlon 1.4 with 512 MB of ram doesn't need that much speeding up!

The GA7 DXR also uses two Bios chips. Personally, I have never (touch wood) had a bios corruption or chip fail so have no idea of the results (I can guess) that
this would have. However, the DXR will automatically revert to the second bios chip should the main have a fault. You can also use a bundled Gigabyte utility to 'flash' upgrade your Bios. As a test I did just this and it was as painless and easy to accomplish as Gigabyte say - You could even update daily if you felt like it, it's that simple.

The board comes complete with two USB ports on the rear and a separate cable supplying a further two that you put into a spare PCI card slot cover. Attaching the leads was easy with the pre-formed connector.

Putting the board into the case was a doddle. Full instructions and pictures give nearly a step-by-step guide albeit in not perfect English but very easy to understand.

As you will know, the board is for the AMD Socket A chip and this went in with no bother. The only jumper setting that I needed to change in the entire installation of the board was for the CPU speed. (All the default settings were correct) The board is set at 100mhz by default and by dipswitches you change it to the required setting - (133Mhtz) - easy.

I was a little concerned as to the installation of the Heat-sink. To get the clip over the tab on the socket (If you are still reading this you probably know what I mean) you need to use a screwdriver. BE CAREFUL as if it should slip you WILL hit the board with the tip of the screwdriver. (luckily, I did not, but I would not be happy about removing and reinstalling the heat-sink).

Anyway, so far so good and now ready to put all the cables in the right sockets. Again easy and that is about it, ready to boot. The only thing to note hear is that if you use just the IDE 1 and 2 channels, you will get a message that says 'Ultra DMA bios not installed as no devices found' Gigabyte say that this only occurs if you do not use IDE 3 + 4 channels and that ATA100 support is installed on 1 + 2. However, I installed on 3 + 4 but now cannot see Primary and Sl
ave shown on boot, only Ultra Dma = Seagate ?etc.

I did notice some very useful features such as a small LED to show power to the Ram - wait for it to go out before removing any modules to be sure no residual power left. You may be thinking that the power will be off anyway, right?

Well, this board has a Suspend to Ram feature. That is, at any point you can simply press the power switch (even in the middle of editing a document) and the machine will almost instantly 'shut down' - except it doesn't. What it does is to hold all the data safe in the Ram memory and shuts down the screen, fans etc using just 2.5 volts to hold the memory safe. Moving the mouse or pressing a key or even pressing the power switch again will wake it up right back to where you left it with no loss of data just like your screen saver - very neat. You could be mistaken for thinking that you have shut down completely so the LED is a good idea.

This attention to detail appeared all over the board and I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of it.

That's not all, Software includes a motherboard monitor (Temperature, fan speeds etc), Bios update utility, Creative Labs drivers for onboard sound (Free up your PCI slots without a soundcard) and if you really want to squeeze the last ounce of speed from your machine a easy to use over-clocking utility that will increase your CPU speed step by step until the system becomes unstable, Too much and all you have to do is reboot. Norton Anti Virus 2001 and Firewall 2001 is a nice bonus too.

Setting up the Bios was very easy and well detailed in the manual and on first boot and after installing Win 98 onto a new hard drive I was amazed to see in the Device Manager not one single exclamation mark - everything working well and at top speed.

In conclusion, an excellent board that went in first time with no problems (and no, I really have never done this before) and a board that will st
and a lot of upgrading in the future. I am so impressed that I will now look to Gigabyte for other products first. I fully recommend it even if you have never really considered building your own before, this board and its set-up makes it simple and takes a lot of beating.

Summary: