High End Motherboard on the Cheap!
Written: Jan 05 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Full featured, moderately overclockable, stable within specs, inexpensive
Cons: Strange reboots with ATI Video In
The Bottom Line: Awesome features and performance for just under $100!
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| nad_masters's Full Review: Gigabyte GA-7VRXP Motherboard |
When seaching for a motherboard for my AMD Athlon XP 1600 , I first went with the ECS K7S5A ( http://www.epinions.com/content_77749128836 ). For $55, the ECS was an awesome motherboard on the cheap, but you must endure strange mods to make it usable. I also attributed the ATI Video In errors to the ECS's poor design (I had 2 ECS boards that did the same thing). But as you can see in my "CONS" list, the 7VRXP also have this problem, which says that it may not be the ECS's fault for such an issue. In either case, I decided to go with a more reliable brand name, and decided to go with the Gigabyte 7VRXP because of the good reviews (Tom's Hardware Guide and Anandtech).
Features
The best feature is the sub $100 price tag. At "press" time, the price still remains effect, and still not a very bad price for the list of features it offers.
My favorite feature: the built-in Prommise RAID 0 and 1. Even if you do not wish to use any of the RAID modes, you can use it as just another ATA100 controller. Support for a total of 8 ATA devices!
Although it's starting to crop up on almost all motherboards, USB 2.0 still may not appear in many boards of this price range (Epox EP-8K3A ).
What about the "usual" built in sound? Well, if Gigabyte was going to go for "mediocore", they mind as well go out in designer clothes. The built-in sound is provided by Creative Lab's, and sits on the PCI bus (without taking a slot, of course). Using their Creative CT5880 chipset, it's pretty much a Sound Blaster 128 PCI.
And who would have thought... a standard fare built-in LAN based on the Realtek RT8100BL chip. This chip is a personal favorite, as Realtek have driver support for almost all OSes, even BeOS and Windows CE. Strange does not accurately describe that! Cheap network cards use this chipset, but it's a very full featured and reliable (and highly supported).
And who can forget Gigabyte's exclusive "Dual BIOS"? This feature actually gives the motherboard two Flash ROMs, each containing a copy of the firmware. You can update them individually, so you can test out that new firmware you just downloaded, and not be afraid of other bugs being introduced with the new version, or even a bad flash. Or you can be weird and just have 2 different fimrware versions and pick and choose which to boot from. :)
There are other stuff like having 6 USB ports (combined 1.1 and 2.0) and three different memory cards reader. And with 3 DDR DIMM slots and 5 PCI slots, expanding is not a problem - especially with all those built-in stuff!
Problems
None significant. What else can I say? It has been stable all this time, except for ATI's Video In application. When the CPU is stressed while using the Video In app, it causes a dialog box to pop up which complians about a memory error (which is not the case), and once you click "OK" to close the box, the PC reboots spontaneously (not gracefully as if you were restarting in Windows).
Overclocking
With an XP 1600 and 2 256 MB DIMMs (Crucial CL 2.5 running at 2.0), I was able to pump the FSB to a maximum of 140 MHz relaibly. I even unlocked the CPU and lowered the multiplier to see how high I can take the FSB with the current config, and 140 was it.
I suspect the memory is holding it up, and may invest in DDR333 or DDR400 memory in the future. Just imagine - keeping the multiplier low so the CPU won't be "out of spec", while pumping up the FSB to 200 MHz. :)
The 7VRXP helps alot in the overclocking department, thanks to thier engineers allowing their CPU core voltage to go up to 1.925 Volt and the AGP up to 1.8 Volt.
This motherboard can still be overclocked reliably, but you have to be creative when doing so.
Performance
With a Radeon 64 DDR VIVO card, I was able to get decent performance. I was not going after top performance, but a cheap system that can still do gaming. The motherboard can probably still support high performance parts like a Radeon 9700 or the upcomming GeForce FX, the XP 2800 , and Corsair DDR400 CL2 memory, all without hampering their performance. But of course, if you were going to start out high, mind as well start off with a nForce 2 chipset instead of the KT333.
Conclusion
I definately give a thumbs up when you are considering a cheap motherboard that can support the current fastest CPU (2800 ) which requires a 166 MHz FSB, and still have the no non-sense features. All this at an affordable $100.
But of course, if you were going to go all out, check out the highly featured (even stuff we don't need yet like SATA) nForce2-based boards (my favorite being the Asus A7N8X Deluxe). :)
Recommended:
Yes
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nad_masters
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Location: Chicago, IL, USA
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