Posted on Sunday, August 25 2002 @ 16:41 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckToday, Gigabyte enters our lab with their 7VAXP sporting "AGP 8X" and "DDR400" on its box. Now based on our past experience- Gigabyte has produced boards that have ranged from average to excellent. Lets see if the 7VAXP can finally take off the KT400 chipset with the performance we're looking for.
Voor overclockers en tweakers is dit trouwens geen goed mobo aangezien het te weinig mogelijkheden bied :
We’re used to seeing the “Top Performance” option in the BIOS in Gigabyte boards which is also present on the 7VAXP, however, we were extremely surprised to not see the “Advanced chipset” option that lets you tweak memory timings. That’s right folks- there’s no option to adjust anything like CAS Latency or Bank Interleave. The only options you have are “Optimized settings” or “Enable Top Performance” which, according to our knowledge, sets the DRAM Command Rate to 1. You do however, have the option of setting the memory speed between DDR266, DDR333 and DDR400.Wel een pluspunt is de Dual BIOS functie :
Overclocking options are also not the best on the 7VAXP. The BIOS lets you adjust FSB settings between 100 and 200MHz depending on the setting of the onboard FSB switch. Voltages can be adjusted for the CPU by 5%, 7.5% or 10% whereas both AGP and DIMM voltage can be increased by 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3V. We were able to take our unlocked Athlon XP 1800+ all the way up to 195MHz FSB which is pretty decent but not a record of any sort. Anything above that caused hard disk corruption.
One good thing about Gigabyte is the Dual BIOS and Q-Flash. Dual BIOS, as most of you are aware, puts two BIOS chips onboard so in case one of them gets corrupted or infected, the other one can take over. Q-Flash is also very helpful as it allows you to flash the BIOS from within the BIOS meaning there is no need to prepare a startup disk and boot from it to update the BIOS.En over de stabiliteit hadden ze ook niks dan goed te zeggen :
Stability was not an issue with the 7VAXP. Everything on the board performed quite smoothly. We used a couple of different memory modules without any problems. None of the USB devices or graphics cards gave us any problems either. Once we had finished benchmarking, we set the board looping 3D Mark overnight and it was still doing that the next morning. The folks at Gigabyte have built a very stable product.Tbreak's conclusie over dit moederbord :
Once again, the KT400 fails to impress with performance. Gigabyte does alright with the features and stability but we really dont see the reason for anyone to upgrade from a KT333, or even a KT266A at this moment. Hopefully the newer 166FSB Athlons releasing in upcoming weeks will make the KT400 shine, but until then, just stick to your current rig.De volledige review vind je op Tbreak.com
