When you need a system board "all-inclusive", try this one
Written: Feb 15 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lots of good features, Very fast board
Cons: Some quirks of VIA design, stability problems
The Bottom Line: Lots of features, avoid coupling it with a Creative sound card.
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| axecat's Full Review: GIGA-BYTE TECHNOLOGY ATX MBD VIA KT400 8XAGP ATA1... |
Being my third AMD Athlon board, following Gigabyte's KT-266A and KM-266 offerings, I got myself one of this GA-7VAXPs. Actually, I work on the field of digital video making, and having such good features as Firewire/I.Link on board not only saved me a good PCI slot, but also offering other features like DualBios, among others, my final buying decision was made.
UNPACKING
With the GA-7VAXP comes a nice manual written in English, with the 4 USB 2.0 port header, 3 IEEE-1394 header, Surround Kit, 3 ATA 80-pin compatible cables, 1 CD-ROM with drivers and good software (more on that later), floppy cable, and an ATX plaque that goes on the system box.
The board comes in an anti-static bag cushioned by plastic foam on the bottom of the box. It's very large, with 3xDDR-SDRAM DIMM (this memory effectively doubles available system bandwidth), 5xPCI slots (for upgrading), 1xAGP 8x slot, able to work with ATI's Radeon 9500/9700 offerings, or nVidia's Ti4800/GeForce FX at full speed, parallel, 2 serial ports, a total of 6 USB 2.0 ports, 100 MBps LAN, PS/2 mouse, keyboard, audio and joystick connectors, 3x IEEE 1394 Firewire connectors, for use with Digital Camcorders, connectors for MemoryStick and other models of memory cards readers (the later not included), 2x ATA-133 hard drive ports controlled by the KT400, and 2xATA-133/RAID connectors, controlled by Promise's PDC20276 Parallel controller. As you can read, there are plenty of possibilities with this board as it can be used for building up a system for Digital Video Editing, Gaming, High-Speed Internet access, etc.
INSTALLING
The board is well constructed by Gigabyte. The instructions manual is easy, and it has also a folding quick-install guide who shows some critical steps for installing AMD's Athlon XP processors. The board is well laid-out so installing RAM, CPU, AGP, PCI, etc. is easy and leaves you with a neat installation. Gigabyte's has done a great job with this board.
Software and drivers are easy to install, since drivers are straightforward VIA's 4-in-1 (now called Hyperion), and software is pretty interesting. Not only Gigabyte includes the classic hardware monitor and DMI viewer, but also it features @BIOS, the best BIOS updating utility I have ever used. You can flash your BIOS within Windows XP!. And not only that. FaceWizard let's you place a picture (640x480 .BMP 8-bit) for your initial bootscreen so your system reaches coolness galore.
PERFORMANCE AND QUIRKS.
As my system is configured with 2x266 MHz DDR-SDRAM DIMMs, I cannot say about DDR-400 problems. The BIOS is very complete with options on System Performance, as I have found, my system is above average on 3D Mark 2001 compared to other systems equipped with ATI's Radeon 7500. I have installed several options on this board and they have worked ok, except for Creative's Soundblaster Live and Audigy products, who have introduced data corruption on my system. As things went, I downgraded my system from current BIOS F10 to BIOS F5, the original, and found that the data corruption dissappeared (go figure).
Aside from that, this KT400 board has not given me any problems. It runs nice and cool and has lots of expandibility. I'm looking forward for my Radeon 9500 Pro to arrive so I can use the AGP 8x slot at it's full potential.
It's not as stable as my previous GA-6BXC, but I think that's not Gigabyte's fault but VIA's, but it's a good board for experienced users.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
axecat
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Reviews written: 10
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