|
Dual Bios
Another very strong nice feature that is included in Gigabyte's
mainboard is Dual Bios technology. Yes, you read this correctly. The
motherboard has two BIOS's. For example if one BIOS should stop working
for whatever reason (virus, crash, static). The 2nd BIOS immediately
takes over the 1st BIOS. Therefore your system will work and operate as
normal. There has been some criticism on this feature in other
reviews. It came to my ear that dual bios was not needed and came to the
expense of the consumer since they are paying for it. I do not
agree, a motherboards worst nightmare is it's BIOS. I have red somewhere
once that more then 60% of motherboard returned simply have a BIOS
problem. If you short out for whatever reason the chance is high that
the Bios on that motherboard is the buffer section to which all power
will be diverted. Recently a friend of mine had a shortage in his system
probably due to a faulty connector. Immediately his system shut down and
his BIOS was fried.
The Dual Bios technology prevents the need for sending back your highly
needed motherboard. And hey ... in the future when you flash your bios,
you won't have to cross your thumbs anymore, you know that you are safe
with the 2nd BIOS installed.
the AMR Slot
On the mainboard you will notice a new port also, this is the
low-cost Audio Modem solution that I was talking about. AMR means Audio / Modem
riser, the AMR specification is an open industry standard specification
that defines a hardware motherboard rise board and interface, which
supports both audio and modem, while also addressing specific functional
limitations of today's audio and modem subsystems.
Benchmarks
Right, do you have enough of the technical blah blah ? Do you want to
see how this motherboard holds up against other solutions ? Let's do
some benchmarking. All benchmarks are based up-on a 700 MHz
Athlon Thunderbird processor system with 128 MB CAS2 PC133 Corsair SDRAM.
Test System
Gigabyte 7ZX KT133 Mainboard
AMD 700 MHz Athlon Thunderbird
128 MB CAS2 SDRAM (Corsair
memory)
Creative SB Live! Platinum
3COM 3C900B-TPO Ethernet Card
Windows 98 Second Edition
DirectX 7.0a
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS 64MB - Driver: Detonator 5.22
Memory performance is well, unfortunately
I experienced some problems while I updated SiSoft's
Sandra benchmark so that we
could not see any comparative material. But I can report that memory
performance is excellent on the 7ZX.
Processor performance. What's there to
say ? The score is right on par with an Athlon 700 MHz. I would have
loved to insert some overclocking CPU results in here though .. Aah, we
can't have it all for a mainboard with a really low price I guess
!
|
