An amazing fast board.
Written: Aug 19 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speed, power, options, features, and speed. Rock solid performance.
Cons: Difficult to manipulate.
The Bottom Line: Great board. Great performance and stability, but for a price.
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| darkvapor's Full Review: Gigabyte Socket A GA-7DXR+ Motherboard |
This board certainly drew my attention when I was looking to get a DDR Socket A motherboard. And despite the heafty price tag, I went ahead and bought it. This was a great decision...
The best features:
1) Power and speed. Although I haven't done any benchmarks myself comparing it to similar boards, I have done extensive research into other people's tests. And this board is certainly one of the fastest boards out there right now. This board is a must for overclockers and advanced users. This board consistently has the best memory speed tests. And when I tested my CPU with SiSoft Sandra, I beat out a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 with my AMD1.4Ghz by over 800MIPS. That's pretty impressive.
2) Stability. In the month that I have used this board, I have not had a single hardware lockup. Although I am not overclocking, I am running a pretty hardware intensive system.
3)Features. This motherboard has the best regulated power controllers currently available. This means stability for demanding components. This motherboard also has 3 ram slots, 1 more than the chipset even originally allowed for. The built in soundchip, although I use a separate card, is very nice and high quality. The ability to use a AGP Pro slot is also very cool.
4)Layout. Very good layout of the components. Nothing got in the way during installation, and the heatsink fits great without any capacitors or anything getting in the way.
The Bad.
1)Price. This bad boy is pretty expensive. I found it hard to find too, but that was because it was barely released at the time.
2)Although the onboard jumpers and dipswitches give you great control, they are hard to access, Especially when you have all the components installed. The BIOS also lacks certain high end control features (Although this is also the cause of many many instability problems if you arent perfect). Nevertheless, an advanced user can manually modify the BIOS (do not attempt this at home kids).
3)Although this isn't a bad thing, infact, its kind of a good thing; the temperature gauges on the motherboard read a lot hotter than other motherboards on the market. The reason for this is the way the temperature is measured. The actual probe touches the core, instead of just measuring the temperature underneath the chip. Although this worries many many people, it is actually a lot more accurate than other motherboards will have you believe. In fact, just stick another 3rd party temperature probe in there and see.
Verdict:
This board rocks! Although I spent a lot of money building my computer, I am very happy with the performance. Rock solid stability too! No conflicts, no hardware problems... its all good!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 188
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Epinions.com ID:
darkvapor
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Location: Atlanta, Ga, USA
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Aerospace engineering student at Georgia Tech.
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