The Boards

The big boys

We managed to get our hands on four boards from four manufactures: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Tyan. There are other boards out there but the other manufacturers couldn’t deliver in time for this article while other companies decided to wait for AMD to supply a fix for the its chipset issues. All the boards we received were packaged with USB controller cards to compensate for the lack of working USB features inside the 768 southbridge. The boxes also came with the usual expected items such as cables and documents.

Money shot

Specifications
	PCI	USB	ATX12V	Audio	Bus Tweak	Voltage Tweak	IDE RAID	LAN
ASUS A7M266-D	5	2.0 Card	Yes	Yes (C- Media)	Yes	No	No	No
Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW	5	2.0 Card	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Promise	Intel
MSI K7D Master	5	2.0 Card	Yes	Yes	Yes	VCORE	No	No
Tyan Tiger MPX	6	1.0 Card	Not Required	No	No	No	No	3COM

From the looks of it, Gigabyte’s GA-7DPXDW is the most feature filled motherboard in this roundup. The GA-7DPXDW comes with Promise’s ATA RAID controller, pumping data at 100MB/sec. bursts. It also comes with an Intel 82550 Ethernet controller that’s capable of 10/100Mbit speeds. The Ethernet controller is a good choice as experience with Intel Ethernet controllers have revealed them to be highly efficient, fast, and low on processor utilization.

All the boards are equipped with two 64-bit/66MHz and three 32-bit/33MHz PCI slots. The only entry-level 760 MP solution out there is the Tiger MP from Tyan which features more 64-bit slots but they all operate at only 33MHz. This about the only benefit there is to using a 760 MPX board compared to a 760 MP board. There are actually a few benefits that 760 MP boards have that the 760 MPX should have come with in the first place.

Users of 760 MPX boards will have to use a PS/2 keyboard in order to control basic features of the board like those found in the BIOS. Because USB functionality is upper level hardware, it requires support from an OS or BIOS emulation. Since this is the case, you won’t be able to control a 760 MPX with a USB keyboard even if attached to a USB controller – at least not until Windows or another USB compliant OS is installed.

This is a shame because we’ve already heard of customer complaints about not being able to use USB keyboards. Fortunately, most keyboards out there are still using PS/2 connectors. If you do end up buying a USB keyboard anyway, make sure it comes with a USB to PS/2 adapter. This will allow you to do preliminary setup with you 760 MPX board and then switch to USB once an OS has been installed.