Excellent motherboard, supports new Palomino cpu
Written: Aug 06 '01 (Updated Nov 26 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent layout, cpu speed and multiplier set by dipswitch banks, excellent resource assignment
Cons: Dipswitch banks are hard to see when board installed in case. Mutant chipset
The Bottom Line: Well designed board, easy to install, great resource allocation, no problems with soundblaster LIVE soundcards. A board for the future with full support for Palomino(XP).
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| suemccartin's Full Review: Gigabyte Socket A GA-7DXR+ Motherboard |
I had heard a great deal of good things about Gigabyte motherboards but never owned one until recently. I also have a Gigabyte GA7IXE slot A motherboard and that was my first experience with this company (see my review of that board also).
When I decided to upgrade to socket A my earlier experiences with Gigabyte's technical support convinced me to try another of their products. I can't say enough nice things about this company. They actually answer tech support emails in a timely fashion (I get replies within the week I send the emails) and they also staff the three usenet groups available for this motherboard. After bad experiences with Abit, who never answers emails or staffs their own usenet groups, Gigabyte is a-1 in my book.
The GA7DXR has several unusual characteristics which attracted my attention:
1-A second on board IDE controller. It's possible to run 8 IDE devices on this board at once if you so desire. The second IDE controller is the same as the well regarded "Promise" UDMA 100 controller sold as an add-in card for older systems. The Promise controller can also be configured for RAID for server applications (I could spend an hour describing RAID and what it does. Basically it allows two hard drives to run in tandem and mirror the information on each other so that if one drive is lost the other exists as backup and no data is lost).
2-Onboard sound card made by Creative labs. The onboard soundcard is the equivalent of the Soundblaster PCI 128. It supports two or four speakers and has a microphone input (in two speaker mode there is also a line-in jack, which morphs to a second output for the second pair of speakers in 4 speaker mode).
3-Support for all current AMD socket A cpus Thunderbird & Duron, and supposedly with a future bios update, will fully support the brand new AMD Palomino chip (basically just a refined Thunderbird, slightly better performance and less heat production due to smaller die, etc.) At least one of the few places that currently stock the Palomino are selling them with this board.
4-The area around the cpu socket is open and free of capacitors and other board electronics and has holes in the area for a board mounted (as opposed to chip mounted) cpu fan to be installed. If you go out on the net and look around you'll see lots of screaming going on because many current socket A heatsink/fan combinations will knock soldered-on components right off the board if they are too close to the cpu socket or the heatsink is not very carefully installed. This board doesn't have quite the problem because there's nothing close to the cpu socket. A board mounted fan is much safer because you don't have to worry as much about crushing your cpu core, the hardware is engineered to apply exactly the right amount of pressure between the heatsink and cpu core. An example of a board mounted fan is the well regarded mtech 462A with an enormous 6000 rpm delta fan perched on top--this heatsink is unbeatable but also very heavy and quite expensive at over $50.00. I for one would never try to change a heatsink or cpu with the board installed in the case--I'd be afraid of cracking the motherboard with the pressure necessary to install the heatsink clips on a chip mounted fan.
5-AMR slot. Audio Modem Riser. It's my impression that this was intended to support other items besides modems but so far modems seem to be all that's available for the AMR slot. Basically having this slot lets you get a decent modem for 15 dollars instead of 40 or 50. The AMR circuitry puts a lot of the functions normally handled by the modem back on the motherboard itself. This motherboard requires a Primary Codec AMR modem--which don't seem to be available for sale anyplace that I've found.
6-AGP Pro slot. The AGP pro slot on this board will support all current AGP cards and has future support for AGP pro (I'm not sure that an AGP pro card is actually on the consumer market yet. I believe there are a few cards available for the professional doing cad/cam and other types of heavy graphics work). The AGP pro slot has it's own power connector for power hungry high performance video cards and has a jumper selectable power setting for overclocking use.
7-Easy Tune III fast side bus overclocking built into the bios. Easy overclocking & power settings with no jumpers to set. This board also comes with a windows utility that will allow you to overclock the system from within windows!!!
8-Dual bios. This board has two bios chips that back one another up. If one chip is attacked by one of the increasingly frequent bios attacking viruses you should still be able to use your system by automatically booting from the backup bios chip. The board also includes a utility to update your bios from within windows and do it virtually automatically by downloading the bios from the internet!!!!!!!!! (This is neat and seems to work well, no more hitting f8 to get the dos prompt with this board.)
9-3 DDR sdram slots. Most boards only have two. Three slots can be a problematic installation but many folks seem to be able to get three chips working simultaneously so it is possible with the right memory chips. From further research I'm reading that this was put into place with the idea that new high density memory chips will allow single sided 256K memory boards to come on the market. Once those become available there should be fewer issues as three chips will equal the three sides that the chipset is designed to handle.
Installation:
1-MEMORY: Lay the board flat on a hard surface (I put the large piece of foam that came in the bag with the board underneath to cushion it) and install the DDR memory. Like traditional SDRAM the chips will only fit in the socket one way and there are the same type of clips on the sockets to hold it in place. This board has three DDR memory slots, however, due to chipset limitations you may have problems getting three chips to function together at once. There is a three side rule with DDR memory, if you've got three single sided chips you should have no problems. I.e. three double sided chips (256K or larger) may be problematic or not work at all.
2-CPU: Installing the CPU itself is very straight forward and like any socket 7, celeron, or Pentium III/IV board. You lift the latch, look for the notch on the edge of the cpu, line it up with the notch on the cpu socket and press down gently to seat the cpu. I found that I needed to put a small amount of downward pressure on the cpu before I could lock the lever down and seat the cpu properly. Make sure that the cpu looks flat and level before proceeding to the next step.
3-HEATSINK/FAN: This step should be taken extremely slowly and with a great amount of care. NEVER TRY TO DO THIS STEP WITH THE BOARD ALREADY IN THE CASE, I CAN ALMOST GUARANTEE YOU WILL CRACK YOUR MOTHERBOARD DOING IT because of the pressure necessary to lock the heatsink clip onto the cpu socket. If you have never installed a socket A heatsink/fan you should consider having it done by a professional or someone with experience. For around 10 dollars you can purchase a copper shim that is designed to fit between the cpu and the heatsink. In addition to possibly improving heat transfer, the shim also protects the delicate thunderbird core from accidents when installing the heatsink. I highly recommend spending the extra money as physical damage to a cpu is not covered by any warranty and you may not luck out and get AMD to send you a new chip if you damage it during this step.
Before installing the heatsink itself you will need to coat the cpu core with a light coating of suitable thermal compound such as artic silver II or III. DO NOT USE STANDARD THERMAL GREASE (such as purchased at Radio Shack) ON A SOCKET A CHIP. Due to it's nature, standard thermal grease will be pumped away from the core by the heating and cooling action that the chip goes through when the system is started and shut down. I have also heard reports of thermal grease shorting out the bare contacts that exist on the top of a socket A cpu. Artic Silver II is a new type of thermal grease that doesn't have the viscosity problems of standard grease. The Arctic Silver II product is designed to be thick enough (and retain enough viscosity under high heat) that it is not susceptible to the pumping problems seen with regular thermal grease. AMD doesn't recommend thermal grease, they suggest a different compound for heat transfer. Note: some heatsinks come with a thermal pad so grease theoretically isn't needed. There are varying opinions on these pads, but many recommend carefully scraping it off and using the Arctic Silver II instead.
The core on a socket A thunderbird/duron chip is extremely fragile and there is much lamenting going on in the web world from people who have inadvertantly crushed their birdies while trying to install the heatsink. There are many opinions on why this is happening but it apparently affects most socket A chips over one gigahertz. As I mentioned previously, I strongly recommend the use of a shim between the heatsink and the cpu itself. When installing the heatsink it is very important to always press straight down on the top of the heatsink/fan only!!!!!! Never, ever, rock the heatsink into place or place pressure only on one side, you will crush the cpu core!!!!!!! Some heatsinks are very much harder to install than others and I would suggest that you research carefully before choosing your heatsink (i.e. read the reviews to see how hard they were to install, etc.) A good heatsink will include a slot for a flat blade screwdriver to press down with, I found the easiest way to install mine was with a good pair of needlenose pliers that I used to force the clip over the tab on the cpu socket (while pressing straight down on the unit with the other hand).
4-CONFIGURE THE CPU: Using the two banks of dip switches on the board (most have two banks of dip switches, some early boards may have jumpers in place of one of the dip banks)setup the multiplier for automatic and the bus speed appropriate to your cpu. Cpus come in 200 and 266 bus speed, the board defaults to 200 setting so you don't accidently fry your cpu with the wrong settings. I had to take a sharpie pen and put a dot on the top of each switch to make them easier to see (the white of the swiches is tough to see in dim light). If your cpu is a 200 chip the bus speed should be 100, if it's a 266 chip, set it to 133.
5-INSTALL THE BOARD IN THE CASE: The board is ATX layout and is quite large, if you've got a small case it may not fit. Test fit the board until you've got the screw standoffs and plastic supports in all the right places. Once you've got your screw-in supports in the right places, insert screws and tighten slowly until everything lines up in the back of the case, etc. I've heard varying opinions on whether you should use the cardboard washers between the screws and the motherboard, I always use them on my systems. Attach the ATX power connector. Attach case controls, led indicators and the power switch at the front of the board.
6-Install a video card and hook up your hard drives. Windows will usually not be able to deal with a motherboard switch without reinstalling, that's just life in most cases. Keep the system simple for the windows installation.
7-Cross your fingers, hold your breath and hit the power switch. If all is well you should get a single reassuring beep within 30 seconds or so and output on your monitor as the memory posts. CHECK IMMEDIATELY TO BE SURE THE CPU FAN IS RUNNING!!!! It only takes a matter of seconds to heat fry a fast cpu, so poke your flashlight in there and make sure it's running!!!! This board has a fan Guardian function that is supposed to prevent the machine from starting if the cpu fan is not functioning however I would not rely entirely on any gadget when talking about a hundred dollar cpu.
After memory has posted, hit the DEL key to enter bios setup. Even though this board is supposed to have AWARD bios, I've noticed that on my board anyhow, the bios chips are labeled Phoenix and I don't seem to have all the settings I'm used to having available on other AWARD bios motherboards. It appears that Gigabyte likes to limit the functions in their bios setups. For the intial windows installation you may wish to set the board to boot first from the cdrom (assuming your copy of windows comes on a bootable cdrom that is). You will also need to set the appropriate video card in your bios and set agp aperature appropriate to the amount of memory you have onboard.
8-Install windows. Install the chipset drivers off the cdrom that comes with the board. Install your other cards one at a time. Enjoy your hot new system.
MEMORY CONSIDERATIONS: This board cannot use standard SDRAM it is designed for DDR SDRAM only. DDR memory is new and you can thus expect problems with it just because it is new. DDR memory comes in PC1600 and PC2100 both of which are supported by this board (there is also a third newer standard that I've heard of, whether this board can or will support it with a bios upgrade, I don't know). As I stated earlier, due to chipset limitations there is a three side rule associated with DDR memory chips. From what I've heard this is due to the fact that new high density memory chips are slowly becoming available and when they are fully on the market memory sizes traditionally only available as double sided chips will become available as single sided chips. Currently 128K chips are single sided, 256K and larger chips are dual sided. I have a 256K (two sides) and 128K (one side)chip installed in my board with no problems. DDR memory is available in Registered and unregistered varieties. As a rule of thumb, registered memory is often more thoroughly tested and guaranteed to work in your particular board-which makes it a bit more expensive. I have heard reports that this board doesn't like Micron memory, whether this proves to be true I can't say. I purchased my chips from Mushkin, the value PC2100 chips I bought were dirt cheap at 40 dollars for the 256K chip and 20 dollars for the 128K chip and they work perfectly. I have heard that any Mushkin DDR memory works great in this board, even in three chip configurations. When I try to add a third chip I'll post here again with my experiences.
MISCELLANEOUS: The board has 5 pci slots and 0 of the older type of ISA slots. I haven't tried yet to see if this board has the usual issues with pci 1 sharing with the AGP slot but since most boards have that problem I assume I'll see it here too. From what I've read on AGP pro, some cards not only require the agp slot, they also require an open adjacent pci slot (that must be one wierd looking card) so in the long run no one may be able to use that slot for anything anyhow if they want an agp pro video card.
This board does an excellent job of irq assignment. With some boards I've had in the past, irq 3 or 4 is never assigned even when the serial ports are disabled, not here, this board will assign them if the serial ports are shut off and there is no problem with adjacent slots automatically sharing resources as I've had with other boards. I've got a TV card, a network card, the video card, and the soundblaster Live in the system right now and the promise ide controller is active as well, this adds up to a pretty heavily configured system and everything installed fine on the first try with no problems.
While this board has an AMR slot you may have a hard time finding a modem that will work in it. The board requires a Primary Codec AMR modem and many commonly found for sale seem to be secondary codec. The onboard sound chip is fine unless you've got an additional card (such as a TV card) that needs a line-in or internal sound connection. The motherboard provides one audio connector for the cdrom audio output and while the book refers to an auxilliary input, the connector doesn't exist on my revision 2 board. Perhaps this will be remedied in a future revision of the board. Fortunately the highbrid chipset on this motherboard doesn't seem to have any problems with the Soundblaster LIVE Value or Platinum soundcards and I've got that card in the box for my soundcard now and disabled the onboard sound.
The last miscellaneous thing worth mentioning concerns the highbrid nature of the chipset on this board. The board is a mix of AMD761 and VIA chipsets and thus it is necessary to download drivers for the chipset from two different sources. The AMD drivers are smart enough to only install the appropriate drivers but the VIA installer is not that intelligent.
In conclusion I thought this was a fairly painless and easy installation. There have been reports of many doa GA7DXR boards but this is a new board so perhaps some of that can be expected. There was also a run of these boards that has problems selecting the proper cpu voltage and thus it must be manually set. I had a real hard time finding this board for sale and in stock. When shops get them they sell them as fast as they are received. You may find other comparable boards with the extra controller onboard (such as the Epox kta3 ) but from my shopping experience most are way more expensive ($250.00 )than the GA7DXR and don't offer some of the features this board has. Buy.com lists them for sale but they are on perpetual backorder. I am so far enjoying this board very much and I'd recommend it to anyone.
UPDATE 8-13-01: I've had the board running well for a while now and it is fast, stable and compatible, I love it. I'll list some of my experiences below:
1. Occasional hangs at boot when detecting the hard drives. Others on the newsgroups are complaining about this, so it isn't just me. I believe I've found the problem in my case. In the bios setup you must disable floppy seek. For some reason when it's activated the floppy sometimes doesn't respond and that creates a freezup because the system doesn't go ahead and look for the hard drives, you must remove power to fix the issue, a reset button warm boot doesn't fix it. Shutting off floppy seek in the bios seems to have fixed the issue in my case (At least for now it seems to have, I only found this in the last day or so. My other gigabyte board is quirky with the floppy too so this may be an engineering or bios issue of some type.)
2. Heat dissipation from cpu: I bought the AMD approved (for up to 1.3 gig cpus) Thermaltake Volcano II mostly because it got decent reviews and was dirt cheap at 10 bucks (as compared to 30 bucks for other heatsinks). Despite the fact that it only ever feels warm when the machine is running, I don't feel it's doing an adequate job of cooling my 1.2 gig cpu. After I chose the Volcano II I found some more dissenting articles saying they wouldn't put it on a cpu over 1 gig. Some of my problem I'm sure is that I'm in an unairconditioned house in Florida in the summer. The windows utility is reporting operating under load temps in the 64C range which I consider dangerously high. The temperature probe on this board is underneath the cpu inside the socket itself, I've read that this temperature could be as much as ten degrees off because of this. To test, I've ordered a Globalwin CAK38(I may be wrong on that number, it's the new big copper one with the 6000 rpm fan) to see if that will do a better job. I also invested 40 bucks in those new rounded ide cables that are supposed to improve ventilation inside the case because they don't block air flow like the traditional flat ribbon cables.
3. USB support: Unlike some other via based products I've owned the USB controller on this board seems to be an improvement. On my old kx133 based boards the usb controller would hiccup and drop devices every time I turned on my parallel printer, this has apparently been cured on this board. The VIA USB controllers generally have a pretty bad reputation on the USB sites, I don't know if the one in this chipset is supposed to be any better or not. I can tell you that the dos USB keyboard and mouse support works fine on this board (unlike my old abit ka7-100 where it really didn't work right at all)so no more problems when booting into safe mode or flashing the bios from dos while using a USB keyboard. I have a USB transcription headset (Telex H551) that is giving me fits but I think I may have finally gotten it working-whether it will give more fits the next time I use it remains to be seen. USB 2.0 (supposedly better, faster, stronger!!!)is supposed to be right around the corner and controller cards that support it are slowly becoming available although Microsoft doesn't yet support it in any OS except windows 2000 (and those may only be beta drivers since there are no devices available yet that can take advantage of it). As far as I can tell, the usb controller on this board is not USB 2 capable--but I could be wrong. When I load up my other USB devices I'll post more on this.
4. Radeon video card. ATI admits that the Radeon makes some via chipset boards freeze occasionally. They admitted this months ago but apparently haven't yet released a driver to address the problem. One of my favorite games, Diablo II will sometimes crash with a green line across the top of the screen at startup, it's done this on my last three motherboards. No one can agree if this is a software problem or a driver issue. Fortunately it doesn't happen often and is usually fixed with a run of regclean and a reboot. Other than this occasional problem the Radeon works fine in this board. I haven't yet tried the sleep/suspend mode procedures to see if those are working right. When windows is first installed a lot of that stuff is turned on by default and I can remember at least one time the system wouldn't wake up from when the power saver settings kicked in and blanked the monitor. This is often caused by video drivers in my experience. Hopefully ATI will get to fixing this soon.
5. Top Performance setting in bios. Leave this bugger turned off. It is causing all kinds of problems. From what I understand it is apparently some kind of tight set of bios settings that might work if you've got all top expensive components but not if you have "value" memory or a quirky video card. There've been loads of complaints about this on the usenet groups, leave it turned off.
6. Windows utilities for overclocking/tweaking and bios updates from within windows: The tweaking utility works very well and just by clicking on a button I'm getting nearly an extra 100 megahertz out of the system. I.e. it's running at nearly 1.3 gig instead of 1.2 gig by increasing the fsb. The windows bios update utility seems quite easy to use however the last time I looked their server wasn't offering the latest bios available from gigabyte's site. To use the windows bios update software you must have the bios protection selection in bios disabled. There is a setting in bios to prevent bios updates which could save you from a bios attacking virus, if you aren't changing the bios leave the protection enabled to prevent viruses from attacking your bios or the kid sister/brother from playing with the update utility.
7. Dual bios: When the system boots it says press F1 to enter the dual bios utilities, I've yet to be able to get into this setup. The board should automatically revert to the backup bios if there's a problem but from reading the manual there seems to be some minor maintenance that needs to be done occasionally from the dual bios utilities so I will continue to play with this to see why I can't seem to get into it.
I'll post when I find anything else worth mentioning.
update 10-2001: Well had the board for quite awhile now. Other than the occasional hiccup at boot where it doesn't recognize the hard drives, the board runs perfectly. Even with my expensive new copper Global Win heatsink/fan, windows seems to report uncomfortably high cpu temperatures. Well as far as I'm concerned, if the heatsink is never getting anything more than warm it must be doing its job well enough. If anyone can tell me a reliable way of measuring cpu temperature I'd love to hear from you. Gigabyte tech support has no suggestions on the hangs at startup issue except to disconnect my hard drives one at a time until I find the one causing the problem (duh). Well next time I've got a few days free maybe I'll do that. For now I'll just look for bios updates for my dvd and burner drive, those seem to cause issues more than hard drives.
Haven't yet gotten brave enough to try a third stick of memory but that is on my list for future fiddling. I have noticed that one of my software packages, Printmaster Platinum 10 does nothing but GPF on this motherboard. Gigabyte may need a bit of bios tweaking or Broderbund may need a software update. My other main packages, Wordperfect 2001 and Word 2000 work perfectly. I've said it before, AMD/VIA loyalists are treated as unpaid beta testers. Nothing is ever extensively tested with our hardware before it's released.
11-2001 update: Well I've tried a third ddr ram in the third memory slot and all seems to be well. (1 256 chip, and 2 128 chips.) I've got mushkin memory which has an excellent reputation for working well in this motherboard. Gigabyte now officially recognizes support for the Palomino (athlon XP) in this motherboard with the f7 or later bios. I've still got that hang problem occasionally but that is only a minor annoyance and I'm sure that sooner or later I'll figure out what is causing it.
12-2001: The hang issue is apparently finally resolved. I may not have mentioned previously that this board reportedly has issues with Micron memory chips. In my case that seems to have proved true. I pulled the system apart to install one of those new board mounted cpu fans and in the process I put the memory sticks back in the system in different banks. My Mushkin memory sticks have two sticks with IBM chips and one stick with Micron chips, when the Micron stick is in the first or the last bank the machine hangs at drive detection. When I put the Micron stick in the system alone it causes windows to hang at boot up most of the time. Now that I've just got the IBM sticks in the board the hang issue is gone, I must report that putting the 256K stick in the lower bank causes occasional hangs but placing the 128K stick in the lowest bank has eliminated the hang problem completely. I think Gigabyte has some tweaking to do on their bios.
March 2002: Put windows XP Home Edition on this board and it's purring along just fine, no problems.
July 2002: I had a chance to install one of the newer Ga7DXR boards for a friend. It is very similar to the original Ga7DXR, the main differences are the presence of a USB2.0 controller (very nice, gigabyte gives you a four connector plug for the rear of the machine) and the fact that the additional promise controller is now UDMA 133 instead of UDMA 100 as on the original board. Minor differences are that several optional settings have been moved from jumpers to the bios, such as the enable/disable, raid/udma switches for the extra promise ide controller that used to exist as jumpers on the original board, and the deletion of the fan guardian function (which sometimes caused problems on the original version). For the most part the board is nearly identical to the original DXR as far as layout and controls(just some that were jumpers on the original have been moved to the bios). The new usb2.0 controller means that you've got three usb controllers onboard---The original two 1.1 usb slots at the back of the board by the power connector and another 1.1 connector on the board(if your case has usb connectors those could be hooked up here) and then the USB 2.0 4 slot connector that fits into an empty slot(Gigabyte helpfully made the 2.0 connectors a bright orange that matches the plugs on the connector they provide (but you could also hookup case connectors here if you wanted to). I used the case slot in front of the useless amr modem slot) that provides four usb 2.0 connections. This board is now down to around a hundred dollars and even less if you find it on sale, it continues to be quite a deal for all the functions it has and can support all currently available Athlon XP cpu's up to the 2100 . The chipset might be aging but it's still a goodie in terms of stability and compatibility.
Installation of windows xp was just as painless as on the original version--No hassles.
11-2002: Note: be careful installing service package one for xp on this system. It drove my ultra dma drives into pio mode and so far no amount of fiddling has been able to resolve that issue. I'm hearing it's happening to many boards with the via 686B southbridge. I upgraded my main system to a ga7vaxp because I couldn't troubleshoot the drive speed issue. Of course MS is thus far not admitting to any issues being caused by SP1.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 159.00
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Epinions.com ID:
suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 289
Trusted by: 36 members
About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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