Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 2

Gigabyte

Gigabyte really surprised us during Comdex, as they were one of the only two manufacturers that actually demonstrated a running i850 board. On the DDR end, they also have several DDR solutions ready for AMD processors.

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The pictures above show the GA-7DX, one of Gigabyte's Socket-A DDR solutions. It uses the popular combination of AMD's 761 North Bridge and VIA's 686B South Bridge. Thus, it supports 200/266 MHz FSB AMD processors and up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM.

The GA-7DXC, which looks identical to the 7DX, will only support 200MHz FSB AMD processors and PC1600 DDR SDRAM. The South Bridge is also the VIA 686B South Bridge. The reason for eliminating the 266MHz processors and the PC2100 DDR SDRAM support is probably to reduce the price. However, we are not aware of AMD releasing a version of the AMD 761 that only supports a 200 MHz FSB. Meanwhile, everything on the 7DXC appears identical to the 7DX, so it's not quite clear what is going on here.