The details

Promise RAID onboard

Like MSI and ASUS, Gigabyte includes an ATA/100 RAID controller manufactured by Promise Technology on their KT133A board. While all three KT133A motherboards utilize the same Promise controller (the 20265R), only the MSI and Gigabyte motherboards support RAID Level 1 and 0. The ASUS A7V133 only supports RAID Level 0. For a description of RAID, and how it works, please refer back to our ABIT KT7-RAID review.

HighPoint Technologies manufactures a similar controller (the HPT370) that supports RAID Levels 0, 1, and 0+1, but its predecessor, HPT366, has displayed some troubles with some Maxtor hard drives in the past. If time permits (and reader demand is there), perhaps we'll explore the performance difference between both controllers at some point, but for now we'll chalk the preferred controller to Promise Technology on account of its solid reputation.

Voodoo5 testing

The southern end of the board

Playing with jumpers

On the GA-7ZXR 2.2, a jumper is used to toggle between ATA/100 and RAID operation on the Promise controller. We've noticed this requirement with all KT133A motherboards we've tested that make use of the Promise controller, and would prefer a jumperless solution similar to the one used by the ABIT KT7A-RAID.

Along the same lines, the GA-7ZXR 2.2 also employs another jumper to adjust the range of bus speeds available in BIOS. The default setting allows bus speed adjustments between 100 and 132MHz, while the second setting opens bus speeds between 133 and 150MHz. Bus speed adjustment can be accomplished inside BIOS or via dipswitches. Since BIOS is easier to work with and offers more settings, we preferred using it, but dipswitches are just as effective.

The audio connection

For sound duties, Creative's CT5880 chip is provided in addition to the standard AC'97 CODEC. As the equivalent of the Sound Blaster PCI128, the CT5880 is definitely a step up from the norm, but it's certainly no substitute for the 3D positional audio experience provided by the Hercules Game Theater XP or Philip's Acoustic Edge. If you take your gaming really seriously, you'll probably upgrade from the onboard sound provided by the GA-7ZXR 2.2, but for everyone else, the CT5880 gets the job done just fine. One weird quirk we noticed with the sound however is we had to use a jumper to disable it. Attempts to disable sound solely via BIOS were unsuccessful.

Creative's CT5880

Speaking of jumpers (and this is the last time we'll mention them), we also were perplexed with the status of our clear CMOS jumper. While the jumper was mentioned in the manual, it was left off our board.