Socket-A Motherboard Preview

Gigabyte GA-7ZM

Motherboard Specifications
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CPU Interface	Socket-A
Chipset	VIA KT133 VIA 8363 North Bridge VIA 686A South Bridge
L2 Cache	N/A (on-chip)
Form Factor	ATX
Bus Speeds	100 / 102 / 104 / 106 / 107 / 108 109 / 110 / 111 / 112 / 133
Voltages Supported	Auto Detect
Memory Slots	3 168-pin DIMM Slots
Expansion Slots	1 AGP Slot 3 PCI Slots 1 AMR Slot (shared) 0 ISA Slots
AC'97	Analog Devices AD1881A
BIOS	AMI Simple BIOS 1.22

Gigabyte's GA-7ZM certainly seems to be the board closest to being ready for production. Our evaluation sample was labeled revision 2.2 and didn't have any hand soldered components as we found on the rest of the boards. The GA-7ZM is a microATX board, although Gigabyte will have a full fledged ATX board on the market soon as well, most likely with additional features like DualBIOS.

Like other recent Gigabyte boards, the GA-7ZM uses the AMI Simple BIOS with a fully jumpered CPU setup. FSB speeds include 95 / 100 / 105 / 110 / 113 / 115 / 117 / 133, although our early overclocking experiments with the KT133 chipset have only been able to hit FSB speeds of 105 MHz. On the more mature Slot-A platforms, we were able to get in the vicinity of 110 MHz. The available FSB speeds and the stability of those settings could easily change with the final board. Core voltage adjustment was not available on this revision of the board.