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

BIOS

Gigabyte uses the AMIBIOS for the GA-7VTXH. On the surface it appears much like the Award BIOS many tweakers are used to, and as we go deeper, this is obviously not the case...

One thing (and it's a fairly big thing if you rarely refer to the manual) that differs from most Award BIOS' that I'm accustomed to, is that there isn't much in the way of instructions when you wish to change a setting. Everything seemed to really have only an enabled or disabled feature, so there really isn't any need for instructions.

You have a fair number of options for overclocking, but like I said, most are either enabled or disabled as choices. Your sub-options are fairly limited, considering Gigabyte says it's an overclocker's board. One thing that shocked me, although probably not for some of you, is that the BIOS didn't automatically detect my CPU speed. Dropping in my Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) spat out 1.15GHz!! Since I had to go into the BIOS anyhow, I was stumped on why this was happening. I, of course, saw the "By Jumper" option for the CPU, but expected that the FSB should have automatically been detected or at least allow me to manually set it. Obviously, this wasn't the case, and flipping the jumper allowed the CPU to run at it's rated speed.

I'm not sure if there's been an update (I didn't see any when I checked), but one thing that many power users will miss is the lack of any voltage adjustments for the I/O and ram. As any serious overclocker can tell you, being able to control the voltage can make a big difference in overclocking.

Overclocking

I was hoping to get decent results from the board, and although I managed a decent overclock, it was far from being anything spectacular. Like I mentioned about the jumper, it's a two clock jumper where at 100 MHz, it supports FSB settings from 100 MHz to 128 MHz with 1 MHz increments. Setting it at 133 MHz, you have FSB settings 133 MHz to 161 MHz with 1 MHz increments. Being the bold guy that I am, I went straight for 155FSB with a 11.5 multiplier, and was immediately welcomed with a black screen. We finally settled in at 152FSB with a 10x multiplier. I did manage a stable setup with a 155FSB (this was the highest at any multiplier) at 9x, but I didn't feel the 2MHz gain was worth the drop in multiplier.

Benchmarks

Test Setup

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Asus A7V266-E
512MB PC2100 Kingston DDR
2 x 60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Harddrives, Promise RAID
MSI StarForce GeForce 3

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Gigabyte GA-7VTXH
512MB PC2100 Kingston DDR
2 x 60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Harddrives, HPT RAID PCI
MSI StarForce GeForce 3

Windows XP Professional
Via 4-in-1 v4.37(a), w/AGP 4.10
nVidia Detonator 23.11

SiSoft Sandra
PC Mark 2002
Quake 3: Arena
3D Mark 2001SE

Rather than bogging you down with a dozen benchmarks at different speeds and resolutions, we're going to keep things simple. When applicable, only 640x480 scores will be displayed, as that resolution will eliminate the video card as the bottleneck.

We're going to be using the latest version of SiSoft as updates have been made to better reflect the performance of DDR.

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