Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X
Board Revision: 1.2
BIOS Version: F2 (March 1, 2000)
Gigabyte is a company which still makes intensive use of DIP swichtes. That's okay, as setting them is done much faster than setting jumpers. The best solution is of course a soft setup, but Gigabyte may have their reasons to hang on to the DIPswitches.
One DIP block is used to set the multiplier. Luckily, all settings are printed directly besides the DIP block. The second DIP switch block is used for the FSB setting. Here you may also chose overclocked settings like 112, 124, 140 or 150 MHz FSB. 75 and 83 MHz are present as well, just in case you want to overclock your Celeron.
The board has five PCI slots, one ISA slot, the AMR and the AGP slot, which supports AGP 4x. Three DIMM sockets will support up to three modules with 512 MBytes each. Those modules can be standard SDRAM DIMMs, ECC modules or VCM types. Gigabyte installed an on-board speaker, which is situated close to the BIOS chip in the lower left corner. The latter comes without a socket, so you won't be able to exchange it if a BIOS flashing procedure failed.
Three fan headers have been placed on the board, which should be enough even for high-end systems. The AC97 sound system has been revalued with three line-in headers. Other versions of this board may also come with a different sound chip, as there is some space left. This board features Gigabyte's AGP card retention mechanism: The card will be locked after pressing it into the slot and can only be removed by pushing the lock lever.
Two additional USB ports can be used, but I'm sorry to say that the required cable is not included. Getting it could possibly become problematic, as Gigabyte uses a special pin out.
Some of you may be surprised to see that the performance winner does not come from Asus this time. Gigabyte's 6VX7-4X is slightly faster than the competition, fast and great featured. If you can live with some minor disadvantages, you will certainly be happy with this motherboard.
