DDR400 for Athlon: A Comparison of 9 Motherboards

Gigabyte GA-7VAXP, Continued

The ports for Memory Stick, smart card reader or Secure Digital are located in the upper right-hand corner, though the board ships with none of these.

Gigabyte has even thought of digital outputs, so that sound can be produced with modern stereos without any loss of quality. This adapter, which is included in the box as well, offers not only coaxial but also optical digital output.

The additional manual that exclusively deals with the RAID controller is a nice addition. You also get an abridged version of the installation instructions, a comprehensive manual, a Gigabyte sticker for the case and a CD containing all of the drivers as well as Norton AntiVirus 2002 and Personal Firewall 2002. Even Adobe's Acrobat Reader 5.05 is part of the deal.

Your typical Gigabyte box - this time, it's green.

Gigabyte was able to put on quite a show in our benchmarks, right up there with the Asus board. The manufacturer does not provide any options for changing the settings for memory timing in BIOS (except for selecting the clock); you can only activate a "Top Performance" mode. This was enough to produce respectable results.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.