Gigabyte GA-7DXR
Board Revision: 0.3
BIOS Version: F4 (May 24, 2001)
Company Info
Shipping up to a million motherboards a month, Gigabyte belongs to the global Top 5 motherboard companies.
Hardware Features
As the names 7DX and 7DXR are quite similar, you could easily think that the 7DXR is an enhanced version. After comparing the two images, you may have noticed that the 7DXR design is completely different. It comes with five PCI slots, AGP Pro 4x, DualBIOS, Creative SB128 PCI sound chip and the Promise ATA/100 RAID chip.
BIOS
Gigabyte uses a standard Award/Phoenix BIOS, but placed two Flash ROMs onto the motherboard (they call it DualBIOS). If one chip fails, you can switch to the other one by just setting a jumper.
There are several items to disable: the IDE RAID chip, the USB controllers or the sound system. All of them work properly - there are still some motherboards available that do not allow certain components to be disabled.
Configuration And Manual
Several jumpers and DIP switches are spread all over the motherboard. They have to be used to set the multiplier, FSB speed and CPU core voltage. The BIOS allows the FSB speed to be altered as well. However, the amount of jumpers and DIPs is definitely out of time. Abit regularly shows how a jumper-free motherboard can look like.
Test & Performance
The 7DRX is one of the fastest AMD760 motherboards available now. Though the board is equipped with lots of hardware features, it is fast and absolutely stable.
Shipment
Gigabyte provides a driver CD, a full set of IDE cables (three 80-pin IDE), floppy cable, USB adapter cable and a manual.
