VIA KT133A Motherboard Roundup - June 2001

Gigabyte GA-7ZXR (2.2)

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The Gigabyte GA-7ZXR revision 2.2 is the last KT133A motherboard we reviewed and we were absolutely shocked at just how much they could do to a product in a five-month span. The first revision of the board was actually a KT133 board, and we concluded in our November 2000 KT 133 Roundup that the board was far from satisfactory.

Not long after the roundup, we got word from Gigabyte that they were working on including more features in a future version of the board. The first thing they did was add multiplier ratio settings, something most other manufacturers had already included. Then they added quite a few more FSB speeds as well as CPU core voltage tweaks, so that the board could compete with other competitors. We expected these two changes, but the list doesn't stop there. Gigabyte has actually become only the second manufacturer to include both I/O and AGP voltage tweaks, something we did not expect at all.

When it comes to FSB speeds, Gigabyte again surprised us by including 1MHz increments for more precise overclocking. You can choose speeds freely between 100MHz and 120MHz, and then between 133MHz and 150MHz all in the BIOS.

Similar to the ASUS A7V133A, Gigabyte also uses the Promise IDE RAID controller on the GA-7ZXR (2.2). Unlike ASUS, Gigabyte has included the complete Proimse RAID BIOS, which supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configuration, giving you more flexibility. For some odd reason, however, RAID 0+1 support has not been included.

The Promise controller supports RAID 0 and RAID 1

Gigabyte even went in and changed the expansion slot configuration as well. Instead of five PCI and one ISA slots found in the first revision, the current version features a total of six PCI slots, but the ISA slot has been dropped.

Overall, the GA-7ZXR (2.2) is a very nice board when it comes to features in overclocking, expansion, and IDE RAID. Unfortunately, the actual overclocking potential of the board was not as good as we expected. The same goes for the performance, which was not quite up to par.