Gigabyte GA-7ZXR (Rev. 2.2) Socket-A KT133A ATX

Features and Overclocking

Unlike a few other boards out there, the GA-7ZXR (2.2) features just a heatsink on the North Bridge. Fortunately, this is not a major concern, as we have seen that the 8363A can run at 160MHz with such a setup.  On the other hand, the motherboard features a total of three fan headers, one for the CPU HSF and two for chassis fans.  Inside the BIOS, you can monitor the speeds of two fans as well as two temperatures. 

Our tests results show that without any voltage tweaks, the GA-7ZXR (2.2) was able to run the FSB at 145MHz without losing any stability.  By changing the memory timing and turning up the I/O and AGP voltages, we were able to achieve 147MHz. Any higher speed prevented the system from completing POST at all.  This is around a 10% overclock for the 8363A, which is not very impressive since we have seen some boards doing more than 160MHz, which is about a 20% overclocking.

As mentioned earlier, the stability of the original GA-7ZXR was not particularly impressive, leaving lots of room for improvement.  The revision 2.2 board we have here is very different.  With the insertion of a few more MOSFETs and 1200uF capacitors, the board crashed a total of two times in 24 hours during our stress tests.  This is not the most impressive result we have seen among other KT133A boards, but it’s quite good overall anyway.  Furthermore, by playing with the I/O and AGP voltages, we were able to run the stability tests for 24 hours with only one crash, showing that the voltage tweaking options do help to maintain the stability of the system.

The added capacitors and MOSFETs in the bottom right hand corner

Also like the original board, revision 2.2 also features an optional Promise Ultra ATA 100 IDE RAID controller.  Gigabyte chose the PDC20265R controller, which supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations.  If you don’t intend to use the RAID functionality, you can also use the controller as a second Ultra ATA 100 controller, supporting two more IDE channels and up to four IDE devices.  Combined with the two IDE controllers of the 686B South Bridge, you can connect up to eight IDE devices.

The Promise Ultra ATA 100 IDE RAID controller

Also like many other Gigabyte products, the GA-7ZXR (2.2) features their Dual BIOS setup.  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.                                

Gigabyte’s Dual BIOS chips

Unfortunately, Gigabyte did not include jumpers for clearing the CMOS, something we’ve seen a few other manufacturers do in the past. Instead, you have to use a flathead screwdriver to short two solder pads to clear the CMOS, which is somewhat inconvenient.  We’ve seen a couple other manufacturers do this before, most notably ASUS, and there’s no clear reason for it other than to make it more difficult to reset the CMOS. 

Even the manual has been improved quite a bit, providing more detail on RAID setup and driver / utility installation.  Although it’s still not quite at the level of those by ABIT or ASUS, we can see that Gigabyte has put quite a bit of effort in constructing the manual.