There are products that remain in users' minds for a long time. There are other products which survive and which are bought by people but do not impress. Looking back I remember about AMD761 and KT266. We remember about AMD761 as a good chipset, with a nice performance and a good stability. Compared with KT266, AMD761 was a better product. The VIA KT266A changed things a little but we still remember about AMD761 in a positive way. We can not say the same thing about KT266, which is regarded as a transition chipset. Maybe that DDR reached maturity with VIA KT266A, but overall AMD761 was a good chipset for the time when it was released. If we compare AMD DDR solution with the Intel 845D we can see that AMD has provided a superior product. Of course that we can not compare the two chipsets, but we can compare the memory support which is the essence of our discussion. The AMD ability to provide registered memory support from the first release is surely a plus. Today we will take a look at a Gigabyte motherboard which is a real solution for people who do not want to get involved with VIA. You still have to play with VIA SouthBridge, but the main part of the motherboard is powered by the AMD NorthBridge.

Product identification

The motherboard is shipped in a nice looking box, together with a manual, a quick installation color guide, a CD with drivers, two IDE cables and one floppy cable, a bracket with four USB ports and a bracket with two USB ports. I liked a lot the quick installation guide because it provides good information to novice installers. Maybe that more companies should include such guides. The motherboard's manual is also well written, a reason to credit Gigabyte with a close to five points mark for the documentation quality. The motherboard tested was revision 1.0. Let's take a look to the layout. It has been a long time since our last Gigabyte motherboard review and there are several interesting things that are worth mentioning. The board has five PCI slots, one AGP Pro, one CNR and three DIMM slots.

The CPU socket is placed in a good position considering the size of the cooler that can accommodate the design, but if you have a small case you may experience problems when you try to install the cooler because the socket is very close to the power source. A thermal resistor is build into the socket. The position of the ATX connector may not be the best because you have to take the cables over the CPU cooler fan. There are two fan headers close to the CPU and one fan header has a pretty unusual position, near the lower rear motherboard edge. There aren't many fan power cables so long.

GA-7DXR+ has a regular 5.25" drive power header on board to support the AGP slot's additional current requirements. That's quite good because you will not need a Pentium 4 compliant power supply. The AMD 761 is cooled down by a small heatsink and a fan. The board has a lot of USB ports: four USB 1.0 and four USB 2.0. The USB 2.0 function is handled by the NEC D720100AS1 chipset. The Gigabyte USB 2.0 ports design is very good, the extra functions do not affect the board's dimensions. Considering the onboard RAID ATA133, that's quite a performance. I really don't know if there are GA-7DXR+ versions without the Promise PDC20276 controller. You will need two long IDE cables to use RAID because the extra two IDE connectors are in the lower part of the motherboard, far from IDE devices in a tower case. Like all the other Gigabyte motherboards GA-7DXR+ also features the dual BIOS function, an useful feature in a write error or virus attack.

Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ product picture

I was very satisfied to notice that the board has a Creative CT5880 sound chip. Although the sound quality and features are far from a Prodigy, for an onboard sound it's quite a good solution.
On board there are several DIP switches which point to a hardware setup. The number of jumper is limited. There are no wakeup headers between the PCI slots, which is quite positive.