Gigabyte GA-7IX Slot-A AMD 750 ATX

So far, overclocked FSB speeds are virtually non-existant on Athlon motherboards, the GA-7IX is not the first to break the mold and only offers a 100 MHz setting. As such, any overclocking will have to be performed with a "Golden Fingers Device" that allows manipulation of the Athlon's clock multiplier. For more information, AnandTech's Athlon Buyer's Guide Part 2: Overclocking article. In Part 1: Motherboards, the Gigabyte GA-7IX performed admirably in both standard and overclocked stability tests, falling only behind the Asus K7M. However, we have yet to see an Athlon motherboard with stability that matches that of the best i440BX boards, such as the AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold or Tyan Thunderbolt.

Gigabyte has taken the standard Award 4.51PG BIOS and put it on the GA-7IX with virtually no modifications. Thus, tweaking the BIOS to squeeze out every last bit of performance is simply not possible with this board. Power management consists of pretty much the standard stuff these days. Wake on LAN and wake on modem ring headers are available to allow the system to power on in the presence of network activity or incoming call. The BIOS can be set to turn on the system at a specific time. The CPU fan can be shut off when the system suspends to quiet things down a bit. Full ACPI support is included for additional power management options under an ACPI compliant OS, such as Windows 98 or 2000.

Although lacking details on installing a motherboard, the manual is otherwise pretty good for the experienced user and includes detailed information on all connector pin outs as well as the various BIOS settings. On the other hand, the CD is much better than the manual and includes Intel LANdesk Client Manager (LDCM) for hardware monitoring, Trend PC-Cillin 98 (OEM) anti-virus software, a suspend to disk utility, and even DirectX 6.1. Of course, there's also the traditional chipset patches and drivers, which are necessary for proper operation of the AMD 750 chipset.

Hardware monitoring is provided courtesy of the Winbond 83782D hardware monitoring chip. This has become known as one of the best hardware monitoring chips in the motherboard market thanks to it's ability to monitor the CPU temperature via the on-die thermal diode of all 0.25/0.18 micron Intel CPU's. However, the AMD Athlon does not feature any sort of on CPU hardware monitoring, so the GA-7IX features a quick reacting thermistor mounted just in front of the Slot-A connector. Three 3-pin fan connectors are available, one one each side of the Slot-A connector and one at the front of the board in front of the shared PCI/ISA slot. A chassis intrusion sensor is also included at the front of the board.