The name game

For the typical FiringSquad reader, brands like 3dfx, ATI, and NVIDIA are well established and known by practically everyone - "they make graphics cards right?" The same applies to CPU manufacturers AMD and Intel, they're household names around here. In the motherboard market however, two brands stand out among our readers: ABIT and ASUS. Both companies constantly duke it out for the top searched motherboard company on our site, as indicated by the Top 50 searched words page. Considering the nature of our readers (hardware enthusiasts and gamers), this isn't that surprising as ABIT has always had a reputation for building high performance motherboards designed for tweaking, while ASUS strives to combine performance and reliability in one package.

Nevertheless, in terms of mind share, MSI has steadily gained ground on both companies. Last month, we found their KT133A-based K7T Turbo-R offered excellent stability and a very robust feature set. Lurking in the shadows however, is Gigabyte Technology with a compelling KT133A product of their own, the GA-7ZXR 2.x.

Test system running Radeon, 384MB

Shiny blue PCB!

Gigabyte: No slouch in the motherboard market

To the uninitiated, our introduction would suggest Gigabyte Technology is a small player in the motherboard market. In reality, the company is one of Taiwan's largest motherboard manufacturers with many OEMs and system integrators as its primary customers. The OEM space may not mean much to you or me, but Gigabyte's success in this sector was one of the primary reasons they crossed the million-motherboard/month mark last year.

Because of this success, most of Gigabyte's previous products have offered features that appeal primarily to this market. As a result, added extras that we've taken for granted on ABIT, ASUS, and MSI motherboards such as 1MHz bus increments and clock multiplier adjustment tend to be left off Gigabyte motherboards since they're unattractive to their primary customers. With the GA-7ZXR 2.x series however, Gigabyte is offering their first product that's designed to appeal to hardware enthusiasts and gamers.

Features
VIA KT133A chipset
FSB @ 200/266MHz
Supports CPU multiplier 5.0/5.5/.../12.5
1.5V ~ 1.85V 16 scales CPU voltage setting
Supports PC100/133 SDRAM, & VCM Technology
3 168-pin DIMMs for a maximum memory size up to 1.5GB
4 x UltraDMA 33/66/100 IDE Ports
Promise 20265R Onboard
Support IDE RAID 0 or 1, Can connect up to four additional IDE devices
1 AGP/6 PCI/1 CNR Configuration
Creative CT5880 PCI sound chip & AC97 codec
ATX Form Factor: 30.4cm x 23cm
Supports DualBIOS™, EasyTune III™& @BIOS™