440BX Motherboard Review - Summer 1999

Motherboards And Their Features - Gigabyte BX2000

Standard Features

Unique Features

The Gigabyte BX2000 board also provides a pretty standard set of features. However, one of the BX2000's unique features is the Dual BIOS feature. Basically, the motherboard contains two different flash memories that contain the BIOS program. The backup BIOS can be invoked in the case the main BIOS becomes corrupt. This is a nice feature especially for those who are always upgrading to the latest BIOS. I always cross my fingers when flashing a BIOS hoping that there isn't a power loss during the program process. A damaged or corrupt BIOS on most motherboards render the board unusable. All of the configuration settings for this board are achieved via dip switches. The performance of the BX2000 was usually among the top three. Even though the BX2000 offers a good selection of various external clock settings they are missing a very important requirement. That requirement is adjustable voltage settings. Without this the user doesn't have much hope when trying higher frequencies. This is shown in the overclocking section of this article.

I am pleased with the layout of the BX2000 motherboard. However, if I had any say, I would like to see them use colored floppy and IDE connectors.