Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001

Gigabyte GA-6VXD7

Click here to enlarge.

The GA-6VXD7, to be frank, did not do very much to stand out in this roundup. There is no doubt that the board was rock solid under our stability tests when not overclocked, but the board simply does not have a lot of features that many of our readers ask for.

Limited values of FSB speeds are availabe via a set of dip switches.

Overclocking on the board was not too good, with the board remaining marginally stable at 142MHz. In terms of features the board does not have an IDE RAID or SCSI controller option, something that every other contestant here has (albeit optionally in most cases) .

This is not the first time we have seen this, unfortunately. The first version of the Gigabyte KT133 board was not impressive at all either, but the latest KT133A from Gigabyte is a totally different story, where the new board delivers all the features they left out the first time, allowing it to compete with the other top-notch boards.

Gigabyte's Dual BIOS setup.

However, Gigabyte's KT133 board was released entirely too late to be as effective as it could have been.. In this case, the Apollo Pro133A chipset has already started to fade away with the arrival of the Apollo Pro266. Gigabyte needs to come up with a new solution, based on the the Apollo Pro266 chipset as soon as possible to be competitive in this field. At this point in time, the GA-6VXD7 is simply not the best choice.