Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X Apollo Pro 133A Slot-1 ATX

The Bad

Maybe we've just been spoiled, but jumperless CPU setups are what we expect in a motherboard today. Unfortunately, Gigabyte did not feel that step was necessary. While it's not the end of the world, and makes no difference if you don't tweak your system or overclock, it's not that hard to implement as evidenced by the fact that nearly every other manufacturer has done so. The minimal FSB speed selection doesn't help the overclocking situation either. Core voltage adjustments are another essential feature for overclockers that is missing here. If you use an FC-PGA CPU in a slocket adapter, it's likely that the adapter will have voltage tweaks via jumpers.

While DualBIOS is a nice feature that can certainly save you in a number of situations, it does make flashing the BIOS a little more complicated since there are physically 2 BIOS chips on board. The 6VX-4X would complain that the BIOS was corrupt even though our flash was successful and then proceeded to try to copy the backup BIOS to the main BIOS. Unfortunately, this BIOS copy would fail and the system would lockup. Fortunately, a simple reset brought the system back up, but we were stuck in a loop until we entered the DualBIOS configuration utility. From there, we were able to disable the automatic copying of the backup BIOS to the main BIOS.

We've run into this problem on nearly every Gigabyte board we've tested to date - although the VIA 686A hardware monitoring supports reading from the CPU's on-die thermal diode, the 6VX-4X does not take advantage of this feature. Rather, they've gone with a thermistor mounted just in front of the Slot-1 connector.

Our only complain layout wise is the positioning of the ATX power connector. While it's not horrible, it could prevent the use of larger heatsinks. We were also disappointed that Gigabyte did not include the cable necessary to use the 2nd set of USB ports.

Although 4 DIMM slots are provided, the PC133 spec currently only recommends 6 banks of memory, which typically means 3 double sided DIMM's. Since the 694X North Bridge does support 8 banks of memory, you can get away with 4 double sided DIMM's, but that exceeds the PC133 spec. While we didn't encounter any issues in our testing, it is something to be aware of.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

Manufacturer: Corsair
Purchase Website: http://www.corsairmicro.com

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