GA-7DPXDW Experience

Getting to know the board

Gigabyte shipped the board to us in a large unassuming box that contained the following:

• Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW motherboard
  
• Generic USB2.0 5-port (4 external, 1 internal) controller card
  
• User’s manual
  
• ATX back-plate I/O shield
  
• IDE/Floppy Cables

The first complaint we have is with the manual – it’s incomplete. We’re not sure whether it’s because the product is still in production or whether that’s how Gigabyte designed it. The manual is lacking a BIOS section as well as detailed board, memory, processor and heatsink installation. Since it also has onboard RAID and Ethernet, we also expected those related products to be discussed in the manual as well, which they were not. The document is a sparse 20-pages thick, but it does say “Initial Release” in the manual.

Are you registered?

Initially the GA-7DPXDW booted twice and then never booted again. We went through the same diagnostics test that we performed on the Asus board with mixed results. We tried using three different video cards ranging from the latest NVIDIA boards to an old TNT1 and a high-end 3DLabs Oxygen board. After many times of not being able to boot we got the board to boot practically by chance, and then it worked from there on. Oddly the board only detected one processor when we used Athlon MP 1900’s.

We used a post card on all the boards to determine exactly where during the boot process they were stalling and for the GA-7DPXDW, it was memory. It is possible that Gigabyte has not tested and validated the new Corsair modules we were using and so problems could be intermittent. We did try swapping the four 1GB modules around in different orders and number of installed sticks with random results ranging from not booting at all to screen corruption as well as hard freezes.

The post card tells all

We also tested the GA-7DPXDW with unbuffered memory modules from Corsair, Crucial and Mushkin, with no success at all. The board wouldn’t even start with one 128MB module in the first socket (or any). This is a drawback if you were intending to use regular PC2100 DDR modules with the GA-7DPXDW. Everything about this board is appealing to those people who would want to use regular PC2100 modules. But we can see the same features being applied in the workstation or server environments as well. It looks like registered modules are the order of the day for the Gigabyte board.

We tested 4GB of registered PC2100 in the GA-7DPXDW without any problems and the board detected the entire 4GB amount. Unbuffered support aside, the board works great with registered memory and in fact, 760 MPX specifications call for registered memory only.