Gigabyte GA-7ZX

I've had my Gigabyte GA-7ZX for about 4 years now and have had limited problems with it. I'm only running an AMD Thunderbird 850 chip and I have good stable game play on almost everything I play. Although I plan on building another system this summer, I will continue to use a Gigabyte board. If you are having boot up problems with this board you might want to buy yourself a how to book or just read the manual that comes with it.

After all this time I have found the reason for the instability (if it will run at all) of the motherboard with the AMD Thunderbird processor. It is not the motherboard itself but the inability of the VIA KT-133 Chipset to handle timing problems due to the design of the AMD Socket A CPU, (longer traces length which meant that the processor could be used with the less common AMD 750 chipset but not the KT-133). So my upgrade Thunderbird chip is of no use.

The bad point about the Giga-Byte GA-7 ZX motherboard is that the board often fails on 1st boot-up and hangs. But subsequent boots will succeed.

The good point is the board is stable once its booted up. I leave my system on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and reboot maybe once every 4-7 days so the booting problem does not bother me.

So far the system has not crashed, even when I leave on 3 days running as a on-line game server (Medal Of Honour) or as a P2P server for Kazaa downloads.

Of course, the other constraint is limited upgrade options. The board only supports FSB200 CPUs so the faster 266 AMD Athlon/XP Morgan chips maynot fit this board.

I have found the GA-7ZX motherboard from Giga-Byte unstable. Often fails to boot. Dodgy stuff.

I bought 2 motherboards from GIGA-BYTE in the last year and both have done nothing but fail me and my expectations. One was a dual cpu workstation for P3 cpus the second an AMD XP board. They both fail to boot and show a bios. After 6 days of messing around I finally got the dual cpu board to work for about 3 months and one day it died. Called and emailed the company to no avail, they kept sending me emails with more phone numbers to call so I just gave up, not learning from my first mistake I bought the second board and guess what, same old thing no screen, no boot, I tried everything to 3 power supplies, 3 video cards, 4 sticks of ddr ram, 3 hard drives to no avail. I returned the board and vowed never to touch a GIGABYTE product again. GO WITH ASUS. I am no expert but have been building and configuring computers for about 3 years now.

I have had my board for four months now, and I have also had stability and speed problems with it. It seems that Gigabyte, having released a new board, bizarrely felt the need to bundle "old" VIA chipset drivers (4.20) with it that are incompatible with NVidia's GeForce cards. I found that after upgrading the motherboard drivers to the latest version (at the time, 4.24), stability improved greatly over the initial mess I was presented with.

In general, this has improved slightly as the drivers have advanced, although there are still some niggling problems here and there - such as occasional system lockups.

One thing missed in the otherwise comprehensive manual is that the DMA activation option MUST be actived in the VIA driver setup or else you can cripple your hard drive performance.

In short, this motherboard is a good testament to the need to upgrade software - obtaining the latest VIA chipset drivers (www.viatech.com) and GeForce drivers (www.nvidia.com) is a must for a stable, reliable system, although if a driver doesn't work as well as another one you shouldn't upgrade for the hell of it and should replace the best performer (I found, for example, that VIA driver 4.28 works better than 4.29 on my system). However, some might grow tired very quickly of the constant driver-juggling the chipset requires.

System spec:

AMD Athlon TBird 1GHz

KT133 chipset

Creative 3D Blaster GeForce II GTS

20GB IBM Deskstar hard drive

128MB PC133 SDRAM

I just purchased one of these and it seems very slow and

unstable. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

I have:

Athlon Thunderbird 800Mhz

KT-133

nVidia GeForce 256 3D Prophet 32MB

Soundblaster Live! Value

20 Gig Maxtor 7200 harddrive