GA-7DPXDW BIOS

BIOS Checkup

Although one of the sections in the Gigabyte BIOS indicates that it may have customizable voltage settings, there are none. The only useful option to you is the FSB settings which span from 100MHz to 149MHz. The BIOS is also an Award BIOS, which is known for its ease of use and user friendly layout.

Why not 150MHz?

Not many other unique features are inside the BIOS. We would have liked enable and disable options for the onboard Promise controller and Intel Ethernet controller. While it’s true that having hardwired jumpers are more reliable than in-BIOS switches, we haven’t ever experienced a situation where one was noticeably more reliable than the other.

As far as tweaking options go, we would have liked more comprehensive options such as multiplier settings, PCI and AGP dividers for FSB Overclocking, and customizable voltage settings for VCORE and memory. Remembering back to our Iwill XP333-R review, we’re starting to miss those expert tweaking features and wished more motherboard manufacturers followed suit.

I thought Anti-aliasing was the trend

Available for tweaking other than FSB is the onslaught of AGP settings. There are a few AGP settings that even we aren’t familiar with such as AGP ISA Aliasing and AGP Always Compensate. Some of these features aren’t documented anywhere in the GA-7DPXDW manual which also happens to be ultra thin – both in size and content. You can also adjust memory specific features such as latency and timing by change DDR SDRAM Timing by to User instead of Auto.

Flash the BIOS

Unlike other Gigabyte boards, the GA-7DPXDW does not feature its famous DualBIOS feature that it coined a few years ago. DualBIOS actually implements just that, two separate BIOS chips on the same board containing the same information. Should one of them fry or be incorrectly flashed, you can rest easy knowing that you have a second BIOS to back you up.

Flashing the BIOS is probably one of the most risky things to do with a motherboard and is potentially more damaging than configuring FSB speeds incorrectly. With BIOS changes, those that cause the board not to boot can simply be undone by resetting the BIOS using the rest jumper. But having a mishap during a BIOS flash can render a board totally useless.