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Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L
by tomgibbes The Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L is a cheap motherboard which uses the Intel P31 chipset, a cut down version of the highly regarded P35 chipset. I purchased this board for two main reasons. The first was that CustomPC magazine, which I respect, have chosen this as their favourite budget board for many issues. They reviewed it as ... having great over clocking for only a small price. This is one of the reasons I wanted a new board as I wished to over clock my Core 2 Duo CPU. That brings us on the other reason I chose this board. It is very cheap compared to similarly performing motherboards. I got mine for £45 but they can be found for close to £40 as I write this review. The motherboard might of been very cheap but Gigabyte didn't slack off when it came to packaging. The box is a great size and very glossy. Gigabyte gloats about "Ultra Durable Capacitors" on the box which sounds good for a £45 motherboard. The motherboard itself is packaged very well. It is wrapped in a anti-static bag and rests on a thin piece of foam. A few more pieces of foam to prevent the board banging against the side would be nice to see however. The extra stuff you get in the box is also pretty good for a cheap motherboard. I received 2 SATA cables, 1 IDE ribbon and a floppy drive cable, plus a driver CD. The instruction manual is great and covers everything you may need to know. When installing the motherboard I did not come across and obvious problems with the layout and design. The IDE socket is at the bottom of the motherboard which may be a problem concerning cable management if you have drive bays at the top. All of my drives are SATA so I didn't have a problem. The Intel pushpins are a pain in the behind but this isn't Gigabytes fault. I can not go very far into the board's performance as I just wouldn't know where to start to produce accurate results but I can tell you that the board is much faster with the same components than my old Dell Dimension E520. One thing I would like to see Gigabyte fix (they may have already but I am scared of updating the BIOS) is that the board doesn't do anything for about 5 seconds when you press the power button. The fans just turn on and nothing is outputted. This isn't a major problem but boot up speeds would be reduced if this was sorted out. Over clocking, this was the reason I bought it. The motherboard certainly lives up to its name. I reached 450FSB on my E6320 and it successfully survived many torture tests. This is fantastic for such a cheap motherboard. However if you are doing some heavy over clocking on this motherboard make sure you have a very well ventilated case. The Northbridge cooling is scant and it gets quite toasty, there is also no cooling on the VRMs, so don't over volt your CPU to much. Overall I am very happy with this motherboard. It has certainly earned its reputation. I thought I may have to invest in another motherboard when I upgrade to a higher FSB Penryn CPU but this board will even over clock one of them. Read the complete review |
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Gigabyte GA-7VTX
by babajane32 GA-7VTX Socket A Gigabyte dual bios motherboard. Introduction; This Dual Bios motherboard designed to accept AMD/Duron/Athlon/XP processors,incorperates onboard sound,+4 USB,with DDR memory and in innovative dual bios system. Having myself tried and tested this motherboard for 6 months in two machines,I am ... totally convinced of is usefulness and it's place in the market.Providing a very stable board and up to date technology,it has the added benefit of a system that protects your bios against viruses,power fluctuations,incorrect bios upgrades and bios chip failure. Its incorperated resources and features are good,and ample for a very respectable system.However there are a few factors to be considered when choosing a motherboard,and most of the conflicts and incompatibilty problems I have encountered are not documented or advertised by the manufacturer. --------------------------------- Technical Data; Form Factor- 31.1cm x 25.3cm ATX size form factor,4 layers PCB. CPU- AMD Athlon/Duron (K7)Socket A Processor 128 L1 and 256/64K L2 cache on die.Supports 500MHz - 1.2GHz+ and faster. Chipset- VIA KT266 Chipset,consisting of; VT8366 Memory/AGP/PCI Controller(PAC). VT8233 Intergrated Peripheral Controller(PSIPC). Clock Generator- W255/W312/SOP48. 105/110/115/133 MHz system bus speeds. Supports 100-179MHz. 200/266 MHz FSB and DDR bus speeds (PCI 33MHz). Memory- 3x184 pin DDR sockets. Support DDR DRAM PC200/266. Supports up to 3 GB DDR. Supports only 2.5V DDR DIMM. I/O Control- IT8705. Slots- 1 AGP Pro slot supports 4xmode and AGP 2.0 compliant. 5 PCI slot supports 33MHz and PCI 2.2 compliant. 1 AMR(Audio Modem Riser)slot. On-Board IDE- 2 IDE bus ,aster (AT 100/ATA66)IDE ports for up to 4 ATAPI devices. Supports PIO mode 3,4(UDMA 33/ATA 66) IDE and ATAPI CD-ROM. On-Board Per ipherals- 1 floppy supports 2 FDD with 360K,720K,1.2M,1.44M and 2.88M bytes. 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode. 2 serial ports (COM A and COM B). 6 USB ports 1 IrDA connector for Fast IrDA. On-Board Sound- Creative CT5880 sound. Line in/Line out/Mic In/AUX In/CD In/TEL/Game Port SPDIF and 4 Speaker. Hardware Monitor- CPU/System fan revolution detect. CPU/System temperature detect. System voltage detect (Vcore,VDD,Vcc,+12V). PS/2 Connector- PS/2 Keyboard interface and PS/2 Mouse interface. BIOS- Liscensed AMI BIOS,2M bit flash ROM. Support Dual BIOS. Additional Features- Support Wake-On-LAN(WOL)/Wake-On-Ring (WOR). Support Internal/External Modem Ring On. Supprt PS/2,KB/Mouse Powers On. Includes 3 fan powers connectors. Poly fuse for keyboard over-current protection. Support STR (Suspend-To-RAM) function. Support Mic in,Line out,Game port,Front Audio,AUX IN,Telephony. Driver- VIA 4-in1 service pack utility. Creative PCI sound driver. Hardware monitor utility. --------------------------------- Performance and Features- This motherboard has proven itself to me over the last 6 months as an incredibly stable and reliable board.Despite my managing to infect my Bios on numerous occasions(sadly I am a download freak,and one of the side effects is the occasional virus),it has never presented a problem as the dual bios acts as an excellent flushable system,with one being used as the main bios,the other as a back up that can be used to over write the main bios as or when required.The added beauty of this system is that it as almost fully automated. You also have the facility to set the bios to automatically check for updates upon internet connection.Despite this being a nifty feature and the protection of the back up in case of a bad update,I'm afraid I still sti ck my veiw s of " ;don& #39; t fix what isn't broken" and therefore don't have it set to auto update. The speed of the boards facilities is quite good,and although many applications show little speed improvement from the DDR,some do.However with the board supporting such a large quantity of memory,you should not be tempted into cramming you slots full oversized sticks too readily,as some versions of windows will not support the high quanities at all,and others rely on you manually adjusting your Vcache and swap files.Ignore these factors and you could quickly find your state of the art system runs like a tired 486!!! Having also done a little research prior to purchasing my board,I found that it consistantly reached solid midrange results in exhaustive benchmark tests. --------------------------------- Cost and availabilty- Costing me little over £80 6 months ago,this was a bargain,and although computor part prices fluctuate quite alot this board is still available at around that price. It is available at most computor shops although bigger chain outlets I tried do not sell or stock them. Having checked around my local smaller and more specialised computor component suppliers , I was pleased to see a good availabilty and an even price bracket. --------------------------------- Problems- Ok,so we've had the good, now it's time for the bad and the ugly. For the bad,we are talking a few too many jumpers for my liking,and 4 dip switches for the facility of manually dropping the CPU core voltages.Keep well away from the dip switches as there are automated facilities to do this.Add to this the unessecary AMR slot (there's nothing available to use in it except the odd riser modem!!) Ugly!! Yes,very ugly is the fact that this board has a big problem with real magic video cards and tv cards,try to put these in and you'll find it tripping u p all day long,and t hat's only if you can get i t to boot . Oh,and if you are considering using Windows XP,you need to be aware of changes required in your bios settings(turn off USB support for the keyboard and mouse) or else you'll be unable to fully boot and you'll be minus a keyboard and mouse!! None of these little useful,or should I say essential bits of information are to be found anywhere on the gigabyte website, or in the otherwise comprehensive manual, so make a mental note or like me you'll be pulling you hair out for a week or two!! --------------------------------- Summery- This motherboard has some excellent features,and the dual bios is something I would love to see on other manufacturers boards,it is an innovative and reliable solution to one of the main weaknesses encountered by all motherboards.As the internet is becomming more and more accessable and downloading is becomming ever more popular viruses are a prevalent caualty and despite increasingly more effective firewalls and anti viral software,they still slip through and can cause damage. Its down sides are far outweighed by the posative points and it's stability is not to be sniffed at,but it's lack of co-operation when it comes to real magic video cards or tv cards should be taken into account when you are out shopping,after all you know what you want of your computor and if they are an essential part of your requirements you should look to another solution. Having considered all the pro's and cons I still have to give an excellent score to this motherboard.For it's price and stability it gets top marks,and it's less attractive niggles are well worth a compramise. Read the complete review |
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Gigabyte GA-7DXR
by uncle_bob When I brought my computer, about 3 years ago, I shopped around for the best computer I could get. Checking out all the various makes, Compaq, Dell, etc, and eventually decided to do it myself, and have a custom made one. After parting with about 500 hard earned pictures of the Queen, I took home a top of the range AMD 333Mhz, ... computer, with a whopping 2.2 Gig Hard drive, onboard SIS chipset, the works. It was the dogs.. well it was good. Now, 3 years down the line, calculators have more power. Software is to advanced for it, the hard disc was to small, although I did replace that a few years ago for something a bit bigger. Its amazing how fast computers advanced. When I was a wee lad, not that long ago, the QL computer, was the computer to have. With its little cartridges for data, that green and black display, and word processing, which lets face it, was quicker to write by hand. Over time, computers got better, slowly, getting faster and bigger, but it was slow progress, when I got mine, the 333 had just come out, and the biggest one before that was a 300, and there was a fair while between the 2, then suddenly, its like someone hit the turbo button as processors shot from small 333Mhz, up to 1Ghz, and then almost overnight became outdated by the 1.3, 1.4, up to about 2gHZ now, and growing. Of course all this means, the rest of the computer has to grow to keep up. All I wanted was a new processor, but of course it isn't that simple. My old motherboard being an old AT style board, and designed for the smaller processors, wouldn't support the new ones, so I decided it was time to part with more pictures of our beloved Queen and get my computer upgraded. At the end of it all, I ended up having to replace my case to ATX format, bigger power pack, new processor, new graphics card and of course a new motherboard. I looked around, and read various reviews, and narrowed it down to 2, the MSI and the Giga-Byte. Unfortunately I couldn' t get the MSI to support AMD chip, as the place I was buying from only did the Intel one. Me, like a lot of people these days, wouldn't touch Intel with a barge pole, and AMD is the way forward for me, so I went for the Giga-Byte GA-7DXR+ and got myself an AMD 1.33Ghz heart. Because I had a new case, installation was easier, because I just gutted my old case and could start from scratch on rebuilding the new one. So, here's my findings on this board: Installation: I'm sure this should have been easier than it was for me. Reading the other reviews they seem to have had it much easier than I did. For a start, the mounting screws and risers didn't fit together. The screws were about 4mm to long and left the board floating around, not a good thing, so I had to use the mountings from some old serial ports I had. Not a big thing, but wasn't a good start. It fitted into the case easy, and because I had looked around for a case that gave the best access there was plenty of room, and didn't need to start removing power supplies and cutting my fingers to pieces. Once in place, I started plugging in all the bits and bobs that go with computers. This was easy, the IDE slots are well situated and unlike a lot of boards aren't the opposite end to the drives so standard data cables will work. Mind you, if you fill up all your front trays like I do, then it can get a little complicated and crowded in there, and getting to the IDE slots can require some fiddling. The IDE 3 and 4 slots for RAID, I don't use, i'll come to that later! But I can see they would be a bit to far away for your hard drives, maybe. PCI cards slotted in easily, I was surprised, as this usually requires some persuasion and cracking sounds, which never sound good, but these seemed looser and they just slotted in easily. Overall, installation should be easy, as long as your case allows good access, there aren&# 39;t many points on the board where you can hold it to move it around. So did it work? Did it heck. 2 days later I eventually had windows on my screen! Now again, this should be better for a lot of people. The first problem was the lack of onboard graphics. Now this was my fault, I thought it did have onboard graphics, but realised it didn't and wanted an AGP graphics card. My old one having onboard graphics, meant I didn't have one spare, so I had to take one out of another computer, that is in use, just so I could at least see the screen, until I could get a graphics card. Ok, not a problem most people will have, just make sure you have a good AGP card, AGP pro seems favourite, and is supported well with this board. After that, I could not get into windows. This was a puzzlement, should have booted straight in, but for some reason it wouldn't. So messing around with bios didn't help any, so hard disc became suspect, inspected cables, jumpers, etc, and eventually tried it in another computer, and found the disc was fine. What I eventually found was, it wasn't detecting the Hard disc, because it was using RAID, and my discs were not set up for RAID and I didn't want to use it, but I could not find out how to turn it off. Also I had to rearrange the way my IDE drives were set up, putting the 2 hard discs on one and the 2 cd-roms on the other, and adjust jumper settings to match. But it would still want to search the drives and then moan because no array was found. To cut a long story short, I eventually got it working by taking out my main hard drive, formatting it in another computer, then reinstalling it and upgraded to Windows XP while I was at it, starting to think that was a mistake! Review on XP will follow shortly! I eventually worked out how to turn off RAID by accident when disabling the onboard Soundcard. Now it runs fine and is a very good board. So, any special features on this board? Well overall the board looks nice, it's a bit different to the old green boards with white plugs. The board is a blue colour with coloured plugs etc, and although not important, just adds a little bit of attractiveness to it. Dual BiOS. A feature, which has potential, but isn't really needed, but is a nice touch. Basically you have 2 BiOS, 1 acting as a backup really incase you lose your main one. Not something you would hopefully need but it is something they can boast and sets them apart from the rest. RAID support. Although it caused me problems, if you were upgrading your hard drives too, then this is a nice feature, and does make your computer faster, but means you have to have 2 identical discs really for it to be worth it. Experience with RAID has never been good and I personally avoid it, but it's a personal choice. USB 2.0 support. Board has more USB ports then it knows what to do with, think I have about 8 now, coupled with the USB hubs I already have, I have room for about 16 USB devices. That's a lot of web cams! But the support of USB 2.0 these days is a must as more devices demand it. 5 PCI slots. This was a must for me, but yet proved very hard to come by, these days, most boards have onboard sound cards and so on, and so only have about 3 PCI slots, but for someone like me, who uses better soundcards etc, and network cards, modems, etc, you need more. This one has 5 PCI slots, which means future upgrades are possible. AGP X4 support. Although I just use a standard AGP card, for the serious gamer out there the support of AGP X4 is a nice feature. All the connectors are marked, which makes installation a lot easier. And has room for added features not standard, such as wake on LAN, and system fans, etc. Jumpers are also included allowing you to adjust processor performance etc, which before used to require experience and fancy things, now you can just switch jumpers. Alth ough the default settings are fine, all I had to do was change it from 100MHz to 133Mhz. And left the rest as default. The IDE ports are not near the processor, which is a problem I have found before, which means you don?t need to drape your data cables over the CPU Fan, causing airflow problems and cooling problems etc. Problem features? Not many, one I did find was it uses DDR DIMM memory sockets, which isn't a popular configuration, so obtaining memory cards was a bit of a hassle, when shopping in local high street stores, but PC World sorted that out, at a surprisingly low price. RAID should be disabled by default I think, as for someone like me who doesn't need it or want it, just causes problems. Documentation is fine usually, but doesn't give much additional support, and the manual on the CD needs Acrobat reader, which is included on the CD, but the version they give you doesn't support the version the manual is made for. So you have to upgrade it. Silly thing, but not a huge problem. Overall? Overall, it is a good board for the money, and you will be hard pushed to find a better one for that price. Once running it is a nice board, and coupled with an AMD processor, they are a match made in heaven. The bundled software is good, and includes Norton Antivirus 2002, which was a surprise, I don't use it personally, but still useful I'm sure. With various diagnostic software and tweaking software, over clocking etc is easy if you want to do it, but this day and age, there isn't any reason for it. I would use Giga-byte products again, for sure. Read the complete review |
Gigabyte Motherboard |
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1 review Motherboard / |
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3 reviews Socket A for AMD Athlon? / Motherboard /Duron?266/200MHz FSB processors. 3 DDR DIMMs support up to 3GB of PC1600 / PC2100 DDR memory. Support Raid function and overclockable. |
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1 review Socket A for AMD Athlon ™ / Motherboard /Duron ™ 200/266 MHz FSB processors. |
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Motherboard - ATX - LGA1155 Socket - Z77 - USB 3.0 - 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - The motherboard includes an exclusive PCIe expansion card that offers support for the latest B... |
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Motherboard - ATX - LGA1155 Socket - Z68 - USB 3.0, FireWire - Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - with Intel mSATA 20GB SLC SSD Onboard - The GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD motherboard includes a significant performance bo... |
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Motherboard - micro ATX - LGA1155 Socket - Z68 - USB 3.0 - Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - Combining the advantages of the Intel P67 and H67 platforms in one complete package, the Gigabyte Z68 series offer t... |
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Motherboard - micro ATX - LGA1155 Socket - H67 - USB 3.0 - Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - Gigabyte 6 series motherboards incorporate an Intel approved Intersil PWM controller that is VRD 12 (Voltage Regulat... |
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Motherboard - micro ATX - LGA1155 Socket - H61 - USB 3.0 - Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - This GA-HA65M-UD3H-B3 (rev. 1.0) motherboard incorporates an Intel approved Intersil PWM controller that is VRD 12 (... |
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Motherboard - ATX - LGA1155 Socket - Z68 - USB 3.0, FireWire - Gigabit Ethernet - HD Audio (8-channel) - Gigabyte Z68 series motherboards provide all the advanced overclocking features users have come to know and love about the Gigabyte P67 series moth... |
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Motherboard - micro ATX - LGA1155 Socket - Z68 - USB 3.0 - Gigabit Ethernet - onboard graphics (CPU required) - HD Audio (8-channel) - Combining the advantages of the Intel P67 and H67 platforms in one complete package, the Gigabyte Z68 series offer th... |
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