Socket A Is Coming: Test of 10 Boards

Gigabyte GA-7ZM

BIOS-Version: July 17, 2000

Board Revision: 1.0

The GA7ZM is a Micro-ATX board and the little brother of the 7ZX so-to-speak. Because of its compact size it only has three PCI slots. But the rest of the equipment is very complete: 3 DIMM sockets, AC97 sound system with 2 line-ins and configuration via DIPswitches.

Under Quake III the system crashed a few times. Since it was not possible to reproduce these crashes exactly they are probably caused by the main memory. We exclusively used SDRAM from the American company Crucial for our comparison tests, one of the most renowned manufacturers.

It is possible to increase the system clock up to 132 MHz (1 MHz steps up to 112 MHz), but the CPU voltage cannot be altered.

Micro-ATX boards are mainly interesting for office PCs because they are usually only equipped with just the necessary components.