Gigabyte GA-6CX i820 Slot-1 ATX

The Bad

The biggest complaint we had with the 6CX was the lack of a fully configurable CPU setup within the BIOS. It would have been much nicer had the FSB adjustments been located within the BIOS setup itself. A wider variety of FSB settings wouldn't be bad either, and it was equally disappointing to see no control over the CPU voltage provided for either in the BIOS or on the motherboard itself.

The ability to control the RDRAM clock multiplier is another missed feature on the 6CX which is, at the time of publication, currently only reserved to the feature sets of the AOpen AX6C and AX6C-L.

The final complaint that we had about the 6CX was Gigabyte's senseless decision to use an external thermistor to monitor CPU temperature while the board is equipped with an I/O chip capable of monitoring the temperature of all Intel CPUs that could be used with this motherboard using their on-die thermal diode.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2 (the rear 2 are disabled if these are used)

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 128MB MB Mushkin SEC PC800 RDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB MB Mushkin SEC PC800 RDRAM

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com