Gainward 6IBA i440BX ATX Slot-1

The Bad

Gainward overlooked some features that many other motherboard manufacturers have neglected as well. First and foremost is the ability to tweak the CPU core voltage for increased stability (and heat) while overclocking - ABIT with their SoftMenu II still remains the king in that arena. Second is the ability to control the power state when AC power is resumed after a power outage. The Gainward 6IBA simply remains off, which is not what you want a server (or any other computer than needs to be on 24/7) to do. Third is the ability to assign a specific IRQ to a particular PCI slot. This has been a boon for many users trying to sort out fully loaded situations, but something Gainward users will have to do without for now (although there is always the possibility of a BIOS upgrade to correct this oversight). The IRQ for USB cannot be disabled either.

It would be nice if Gainward used the newer Winbond 83782 hardware monitoring chip that includes the ability to read CPU temperature from an on-die thermal diode for more accurate reading. On the other hand, older .35 micron Klamath Pentium II's do not feature the thermal diode, so this would not necessarily be an effective solution for everyone.

Power management support is also lacking. ACPI is not supported at all, which is already quite useful under Windows 98 and will become even more important under Windows 2000. A BIOS update could fix the lack of ACPI support, but none is currently available.

As mentioned earlier, the manual is a bit weak in the installation section. Anyone that has never installed a motherboard before will not feel comfortable with the complete lack of information given in the Gainward manual on this topic. This reflects, of course, reflects their OEM roots where anyone involved in system building would be trained in the installation of a motherboard.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: No

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com