Gigabyte GA-7VAXP MotherBoard Review

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This board is obviously a bit dated, but I figured I would review it for anyone looking for a slightly older board at a good price.

Being that this is the motherboard I have been running for some time, I do not have all the peripherals that came with it. No matter, we will continue the review with what we do have: Gigabyte's GA-7VAXP Motherboard.

A Breif Overview:

200/266/333 FSB Socket A processors (Athlon, Athlon XP, Duron).
PC1600, PC2100, and PC2700 Ram supported
3 DIMMs for DDR ram (3GB Max)
VIA KT400 Chipset
VIA VT8235 Integrated Peripherals Controller
1x AGP Slot (2x, 4x, 8x)
5x PCI Slots
4x IDE Controllers
- 2x IDE HDD/CD-ROM
- 2x RAID, Ultra ATA (100/133), EIDE
1x FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) Controller
1x Parallel Port
2x Serial Ports
6x USB 2.0/1.1 (4 by cables)
3x IEEE 1394 by cable
1x IrDA connect for IR
Onboard Sound
- 2 Font Speaker
- 2 Back Speaker
- 1 Center/Subwoofer
- Line in (by software switch)
- Mic in (by software switch)
RAID supports RAID0 and RAID1
Onboard LAN (Realtek)
Connectors for Onboard Smart Card, Memory Stick and Secure Digital
Readers

Pros:
AGP: This board supports AGP 2x, 4x, and 8x, which is still very current. With PCI-Express just around the corner, AGP will slowly be phased out for graphics cards, but for now, AGP 8x is the fastest slot available. You won't be dissapointed in the AGP area.

PCI: The GA-7VAXP also has five PCI expansion slots. While you can find boards with more, the chances of needing more than 5 PCI slots are low.

Onboard LAN: Although not Gigabit LAN, the onboard LAN port does free up one of your PCI slots from an ethernet card.

Onboard Sound: Even though I never ended up using the onboard sound during its years of use, onboard sound is always a plus.

Parallel/Serial: Although I don't see many people using parallel and serial connections any more, they are here, just in case you have a need for them.

IDE: The IDE on the 7VAXP was one place this board stood out to me. Sporting 4 IDE headers, this board can handle up to 8 Hard Drives. While only 4 of the 8 drives can be in RAID, this is still double the number most boards support (8x vs 4x).

RAM: With support for up to PC2700 DDR RAM, the GA-7VAXP is only slightly behind current technology (most newer boards supporting PC3200).

Dual Bios: This is another area that made the GA-7VAXP stand out to me. The idea behind dual bios is to always have a copy of a good bios stored on the board. If you go to update your bios and something happens: fear not, you have a backup! Just boot back up and go into the Dual Bios settings. From here you can copy your backup to your booting bios. This helped me a tremendous amount over the years (and is a great safety procaution for anyone).

Other: Lots of extra headers: 3x 1394, 4x USB2.0, Smart Card, Memory Stick, Secure Digital (most of which you will never use due to USB versions of the same things being quite cheap).

Cons:
Non-Bios Overclocking: To overclock a chip on this board, you must do most of it via the dip-switches on the board. While all the settings for the dip-switches are printed on the board, it is quite a hassle.

% based Over-Voltage: The board features a % based Over-Voltage control. Instead of changing the voltage from say 2.25v to 2.30, you can only change the voltage from Stock to +5%, +7.5% +10%.

No AGP/PCI Lock: This was one of the major drawbacks of the 7VAXP, there is no AGP/PCI Lock. This means that when you increase the FSB for the chip, the AGP/PCI bus speeds increase also. This can be dangerous for any AGP/PCI cards plugged in and can also make your computer stop booting long before your chip is out of overclocking space. Although this can be fixed by a hacked bios (PCI/AGP Dividers, not lock), it still makes overclocking much more difficult.

Conclusions:
Overall, this board was great to me. I never had any problems with it. For a normal user, this board is great. If you are into overclocking and pushing a board to the limit, Gigabyte's GA-7VAXP might not be for you. With pecent based over-voltage, dip-switch based multipliers/FSB, and no AGP/PCI lock this board makes overclocking a challenge (more than normal). Having only two USB ports on the back was also annoying, I tend to use my USB a lot and found myself having to switch what was plugged in fairly often. It did have headers for four more USB ports, but I never took advantage of those. Being able to have eight hard drives was a treat. This is more than any other board I had ever used and was quite useful. The Onboard Audio and LAN also pushed my rating of this board up a bunch; these features are not uncommon, but always appreciated on a good board. And once again I must push how important I found the dual BIOS to be.

In comparison to more modern boards, this board holds up pretty strongly. The main places it falls short of a newer board are: 400mhz FSB, SATA, PC3200 RAM, Bios-Based Overclocking. In my opinion, if you are building a computer that isn't going to need the newest features, the GA-7VAXP is a good board to go with. When compared to a new board, the price of $30-$35 doesn't seem bad at all.

Normal User :: 9.5/10
Overclocking Enthusiast :: 8/10