There are 5 parts to this review, please use the pulldown below to browse sections or simply hit "Next" at the bottom of each section to continue
Overclocking
Overclocking the Gigabyte 7VAXP should delight anyone who has ever wanted or
tried to in their past. Overclocking does not always mean more MHz; sometimes
the front side bus (FSB) can be overclocked giving an even greater advantage
than pure MHz. But to move the front side bus you need to unlock your XP CPU.
For example a CPU at 1333 MHz (133MHz fsb multiplied by 10) would be slower
than a CPU of 1333mhz at (166MHz fsb multiplied by 8) even though they are at
the same speed. But increasing the FSB of the CPU usually overclocks the PCI/AGP
bus also, therefore causing instability. The answer is a 1/5 divider. It locks
the PCI/AGP bus at 33/66 at the default jumper settings of 100/133/166 on the
motherboard. Anything in between will raise the PCI/AGP bus for tweaking it
also. The Gigabyte 7VAXP contains this divider if the dip switches are used.
The FSB can be increased in 1MHz increments all the way to 200fsb.
If you choose not to unlock your Athlon XP CPU you can set the dip switches
to the desired 100/133/166 and then increase FSB in 1MHz increments. With this
method and the dip switches on 133 I was able to get 140FSB before things started
acting up, but this was with minor tweaking and top performance was still enabled.
With more time playing with the advanced options by lowering the memory timings
and possibly the new bios this could increase.
Gigabyte did include an overclocking utility with this motherboard that allows
you to overclock in a windows environment. Gigabyte calls it the Easytune4.
I found it to be very simple in overclocking, but I changed the settings and
went into the bios the bios did not read what the Easytune4 read. Easytune4
allows you to change the Vcore, FSB settings, AGP and DIMM voltages. I personally
chose to overclock with the bios and dip switches.
Another feature that I noticed was missing was a clear CMOS jumper. Also the
dual BIOS does not clear by removing the battery. To clear the CMOS you have
to short two solder points on the motherboard out for those extreme overclocking
blunders that will not post seeming to kill the board. But for minor overclocking
that exceeds the limits of your memory or CPU and you don't get a post after
twenty seconds it will boot from back up bios without clearing the CMOS.
This board ran really great overclocked at 333fsb with only one glitch that
seems to be consistent with more than just the Gigabyte board. On a restart
you must manually press the restart after pressing restart in windows. From
a fresh boot and every program I have installed it runs perfectly stable. Jedi
Outcast ran all night and the PC remained on for 2 days before rebooting and
was still running fine.
OVERCLOCKING BENCHMARKS
|
Overclocking Benchmarks
|
| |
3D Mark2001se (build330) |
 PC
Mark 2002 Overclocking |
|
|
PC Mark2002 Overclocking |
SiSoft Sandra |
|
Click Images For Larger View
|
You definitely know that through SEO, your business will benefit hugely, so you have to make sure to find the right Link Building Company that can help you gain your goals SEO on lookup motor rankings, finding the best Link Building Company for your business is a lot more crucial than ever. Link building Company will help you | Simple Website Templates. Every great website and web design needs a starting place or point. Our own newly redesigned website started from a basic template that was heavily modified to suit our needs and the same can be done for you. Using our simple sea website templates on our site you can buy website templates Customer Service
As I noted above the Vcore which controls the voltage to the CPU was locked
at 1.85 instead of the 1.75 recommended, even with an XP 2200 the voltage was
.10 high from the recommended 1.65 to 1.75. After heading over to Gigabytes
website and spending several minutes browsing for a phone number that seemed
elusive I gave up and used the customer service email. In order to send an email
I had to fill out their confusing form that seemed to be there to run off people
that had smaller problems and would search elsewhere to resolve their issue.
After completing the form and emailing it took 4 days to get a reply. The reply
stated that they had contacted AMD and 1.85 was normal and would not damage
the CPU. While this statement is true it still may cause some instability for
those with cases that do not have good ventilation or good CPU cooling. On the
.13 micron AMD cores this could be even more of an issue since the core is smaller
giving less contact surface with the heatsink resulting in higher temperatures
under extreme loads. On Gigabytes behalf I have not had any problems as of yet
but still do not like being forced to have my CPU voltage overclocked unwillingly.
Gigabyte is working on a bios that will fix the voltage issue. I have tried
a early version of the bios F6 and it did reduce my Vcore to 1.75 which is standard
for the XP 2000 CPU.
| 
