Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW

The Board

Gigabyte is a company that also has been around for a long time in the industry so it’s no surprise that it has put a lot of its past expertise into the GA-7DPXDW. This board has the most features of all the boards in the roundup and it’s impressive considering that Gigabyte is using the same board space as all the other manufacturers. Packed on board are four Ultra ATA connectors each supporting two drives. Two connectors are attached to the Promise controller, which supports RAID levels 0 and 1.

Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW

No, the USB does not work

Capacitors a bit too close

Board layout is neat and tidy but the positions and angle of the IDE connectors may interfere with long PCI cards. Also, 3 of the 4 IDE connectors are colored red, which is rather confusing. The back ports on the board are also rearranged in a different position with the USB and Ethernet ports on the far end of the board. Despite our hopes, the USB connectors still do not operate properly or at all and the ATX back-plane I/O shield has the USB ports covered up.

Unlike the Asus A7M266-D, Gigabyte’s board has the standard 4 holes around each of the sockets but there isn’t a lot of clearance to install a large heatsink such as the 8045 from Alpha. The capacitors that surround the sockets may sometimes get in the way of installing heatsinks with poorly designed clips. We found that heatsinks from Taisol worked most favorably on all the boards featured here.

Active cooling

100Mbit transfer rates

Supporting 8 drives total

Integrated features

Above you’ll see the integrated Intel 82550 Ethernet controller as well as the Promise PDC20267 UltraATA/100 RAID controller. Currently, Promise has the smallest footprint for RAID controllers in terms of chip size as well as the number of traces. Other solutions from High Point and CMD don’t quite match the efficiency in design that Promise has.

If you examine the RAID photo above, you’ll notice that the 768 southbridge has the designation “B1” on the chip surface. B1 southbridges have the USB fault, which can be easily determined by just looking at the chip. AMD will be releasing a new replacement southbridge with a “B2” marking and it’s likely that board manufacturers will create a new model number or add an extension to existing boards.

5-port USB 2.0

Gigabyte also bundles a USB 2.0 card using the same NEC controller on all the USB 2.0 cards out there, but this card doesn’t seem to have been designed very efficiently. The traces are unnecessarily long but the good thing is that it features an internal USB connector should you want to connect a front-panel USB device.

The GA-7DPXDW features onboard sound that’s controlled by software and we all know this utilizes processor cycles. It would have been much better to see a C-Media solution like the one featured on Asus’ A7M266-D which has 6 discrete channels of audio and sounds very good considering it’s onboard. The GA-7DPXDW also requires that you have an ATX12V power supply handy but you can also buy drive power to ATX12V 4-pin converters for cheap.