Written By:
Date Posted: February 4, 2002
Updated: May 14, 2002

Gigabyte GA-7VTXH

Shunning the generic PCB colour, Gigabyte's board is cool blue. Probably not a big deal to some users, but enthusiasts with case windows will admire it. It's standard Socket-A ATX fare otherwise, with your connections where they should be, and it didn't have any problems fitting into our Antec mid tower case.

Not clearly illustrated here, but the Socket-A connection has plenty of room around it for large heatsinks, including the mounting holes around it for the big boys. Like 99% of the Athlon motherboards on the market, the GA-7VTXH uses a temperature probe for CPU monitoring. This will mean that Athlon XP users can't make use of the internal diode offered by the XP, and will need to be aware that in the event of your heatsink falling off, the CPU will not throttle it's clock speed back, nor shut down quick enough when the maximum safe operating temperature is reached.

A unique feature of the Gigabyte boards is the use of a dual BIOS chip. The explanation behind it is that if your BIOS becomes corrupted, likely through an improper BIOS flash update, the PC will boot, automatically switching to the backup BIOS which will allow you to repair it. In theory, this is great since corrupted BIOS updates do happen, but in practice, you're still best to make sure nothing goes wrong. I read at that their board went dead altogether, but Gigabytes latest flash utility remedies this problem. I didn't test for this myself (I got bills to pay), but whether or not you have a backup BIOS, take care in updating it.

*Update*: Ok, we were due for a BIOS update (this was done after the benchmarks you'll see later on), so after downloading the latest BIOS revision, we proceeded to perform the update. Keep in mind that updating the BIOS is not hard, but potentially dangerous if you don't take precautions. Under no circumstances should you power off or reboot in the middle of the update. We always keep our system plugged into a UPS, which provides lean power and a battery backup.

When I proceeded to update the BIOS, the system seemed to hang halfway. At first, I assumed that it was having problems trying to read the disk, but after a couple minutes, I began to worry. Everything was frozen, and I had no choice but to power down and try again. I decided that now would be a good time to try the backup BIOS, but that chance never came. When I powered up again, I was greeted with a blank screen. Power was certainly being fed into the mainboard, as all the fans turned on as expected, but there was no POST, nor was there any system beeps.

I began the long process of swapping out every component. First, we switched video cards, then ram, then CPU, and finally the power supply. When none of this worked, I placed the possibly defective products into the Asus board, and what do you know? Everything worked. I tried a few more tricks, like flipping some jumpers, but alas. our GA-7VTXH was dead. We tried contacting Gigabyte about this, but nobody in their tech support seemed to care. The board was supplied to us by one of our sponsors, so we were able to swap it and let them deal with Gigabyte.

What did we learn? No matter how much you prepare for something, you'll always have to be prepared for the worst. Now, it's possible that I goofed, but I've must have updated the BIOS (several revisions as well), on well over 2 dozen motherboards in my time, and never has this happened. That being said, I was dissapointed that the Dual BIOS seemed ineffective in helping us recover from a bad update. I'm not sure if this is a documented issue (I couldn't find anything), but this is something that has happened to at least one other person that I know personally, and no, I wasn't around when it happened.

Other than the blue PCB, another aesthetic feature is the shiney, gold heatsink on the VIA Northbridge. It's a passive solution, but since the VIA chipsets tend to run fairly cool, I don't think this will be a major problem.

Gigabyte includes an AGP retention clip with the GA-7VTXH, and although it's a nice addition, I have mixed feelings about it. The reasons for having one makes sense, but the clip itself isn't very user friendly. I has some difficulty detaching my GeForce 3 from the motherboard, as the locking mechanism of the clip wouldn't let go. Eventually, it did come off, but the plastic used is so pliable, I almost broke the clip in the process. The clip is bound to the motherboard, so you have to break it off if you don't want to use it.

The ATX power connection is out of the way of the CPU. Most motherboards I've used placed it next to the CPU, so at times, the wires interfered with the heatsink. Not so here. Next two it are your standard disk controllers. There isn't any RAID on this board, so you can only attach a maximum of four IDE devices.

You have 3 Dimm slots supporting PC1600/2100 DDR. Nothing notable about the input/output connections other than to say that you'll need to puch out some holes, if they aren't already, if you intend to use the included sound. Nothing special about the sound, by the way, as it lacks 5.1 output, and doesn't really sound all that great. If your needs are modest, by all means, use it.

You have 5 PCI slots, which should be enough for most users. Monitoring the I/O traffic is the VIA southbridge. Unlike the previous VIA Southbridge, the problems, associated with Soundblaster Live! and disk data corruption, seem to be solved. I didn't have any issues with our Live! 5.1, but to be honest, I never had any before.

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