Untitled Document
The Gigabyte 7IX and The BIOS From Hell
(Posted Early 2000)
A little over a week ago I reviewed the 7IX and spoke of some
compatibility issues with the board. The fix I presented was to use the most
recent BIOS for the 7IXE board. Although it is a slightly different PCB, the
layout and components are basically the same. This seemed to resolve some of
the problems with certain Aureal Vortex based soundcards. Shortly after I posted
the review, I noticed that Gigabyte had finally updated the BIOS. After flashing
the board with revision F2, the soundcard problems were fixed. Great, I thought,
they finally did it! I ran the new BIOS for about a day and then popped in Unreal
Tournament for quick LAN game. "What the hell is this", I shouted.
Framerates were unbearable. Apparently the new version of the BIOS crippled
L2 cache. How could this have slipped by the engineers? The next day I saw a
post over at AMDZONE that
there was a leaked beta version of the 7IX BIOS which fixed the L2 cache problem.
I flashed the board again and all was good. It has now been several days since
the incident and Gigabyte still has yet to post a final version of the F3a BIOS!
Not only that, but version F2 is still available for download with the L2 cache
problems. I decided to do a little test and see what the difference was in all
of the BIOS versions.
I used 3DMark2000 to test the system on a fresh install of Win98.
All tests were run at 800 X 600 on a TNT2 card at default clockspeeds. Each
test was run, rebooted, then run again. I took the average of five scores and
placed them on a graph. Here are the results.
AMD Athlon 700mhz on Gigabyte 7IX
|
7IX-F2
|
2531
|
|
7IX-F1
|
3422
|
|
7IXE-F3
|
3435
|
|
7IX-F3a
|
3445
|
You can see from the graph, that the F2 BIOS is severely lagging
behind the rest. All of the others are pretty close with the F3a coming in best.
I can't help but wonder why gigabyte has yet to post the new BIOS. Another note
is that all of the 7IX BIOS versions have the SDRAM Trcd Timing set to 3 as
default. The 7IXE uses 2 cycle as the default. Setting it to 2 allows for 50
extra points in 3DMark. This is what I used for testing. The lack of support
for this board simply blows my mind. Until Gigabyte posts a new BIOS, I have
left a copy of the beta version on this server here. If
you have any questions or comments feel free to email
me.
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