Gigabyte GA-6VXD7 Dual Socket-370 Apollo Pro133A ATX

Overclocking: Something is Missing

From an overclockers perspective, Gigabyte has not been a strong competitor because their motherboards usually don't have too many tweaking options, especially compared to the likes of ABIT or ASUS. Possibly the biggest weakness for Gigabyte in this arena is the fact that stability goes downhill quickly when overclocking, despite running rock solid the rest of the time. This is probably an issue in the design of the board, where the traces are laid out according to specifications, but not for anything faster.

With the GA-6VXD7, Gigabyte once again has a very short list of FSB speeds available - 100 / 112 / 124 / 133 / 142 / 152MHz. This set of FSB speeds is definitely not enough for serious overclocking, since there are quite large gaps between FSB speeds, and since Intel processors are multiplier locked, small increments in FSB speed is critical to really push the envelope.

The only overclocking options on the GA-6VXD7: a handful of FSB speeds

Furthermore, there are no voltage tweaking options for either the CPU or I/O, which is odd even for Gigabyte. Votlage tweaks are useful in improving the stability of a system under overclocked situations.

With all these options lacking on the GA-6VXD7, it should come as no surprise that overclocking results were unimpressive to say the least. We were able to push the board to run marginally stable at 142MHz, but at 152MHz the system wouldn't boot at all, even though our CPUs have been able to handle that kind of FSB speed in the past.

With that said, the board was incredibly stable at default speeds and didn't crash once in 36 hours. This should come as no surprise, especially given the target market of an SMP board where stability is critical.

Once again, the GA-6VXD7 sports Gigabyte's flagship Dual BIOS setup, which is virtually standard on all their top boards. Basically, Gigabyte includes two BIOS chips on the motherboard, and in the case of virus BIOS corruption, the backup BIOS is automatically used to boot the system, allowing you to recover the system without any downtime.

Dual BIOS setup on the GA-6VXD7

The manual provided with the GA-6VXD7 is about average. It is not as detailed as some of the more recent Gigabyte boards we have seen, include many more diagrams, instructions, and information. The manual included with this board still contains a fair amount of information for you to setup your system correctly.