Untitled Document
The Gigabyte 7IX
Supplied by: Me
Specifications
The Gigabyte 7IX is your basic, no frills Athlon motherboard.
It's design is fairly close to the Fester reference. There are no great overclocking
options in the bios. In fact, the next jump up for the clock generator is 120mhz.
A feet I have yet to see. It ships with an Award bios, but I will get to that
later.
I received this board through the AMD Employee Purchase Program.
I am a computer technician for Microcenter and was able to take advantage of
the deal. I received the 7IX and an Athlon 650 for a very low cost. The board
arrived on Christmas eve. I slapped it together as soon as I returned from the
holidays.
| Form
Factor |
ATX |
| Chipset |
AMD 751,
756 |
| Bus
Speeds |
100
mhz |
| Slots |
1-5-2 |
| IDE |
4 ATA 66
Devices |
| Dimms |
3 Slots
768Mb Max |
| USB |
2 Rear
or Front |
| AGP |
2x |
System
| Creative TNT2 |
| Maxtor 13gig ATA
66 |
| 64 Mb PC 100 |
| Aureal Vortex Sound |
| 3C509-B Ethernet |
| Creative DXR2 |
| Iomega ZipCD 650 |
The first problem I ran into was with ram, obvioulsy. I had
two 64mb dimms which I migrated over from one of my K6-2 400's. I knew the ram
had to be of good quality. The ram I had wasn't all that good. The LGS (Goldstar)
ram worked perfectly, no problem. However, the Texas Instrument module caused
the system not to post. Oh well, I figured I would just go up to the local comuter
store and get some ram. I used a PC-100 64mb dimm which the store often used
in their Asus K7M based systems. In the 7IX it would freeze when booting Windows.
Ok, I took that one back and got some of the best ram they had. It wasn't Micron
or anything but I thought it would work. This time, it booted to Windows fine
and appeared to be OK. However, I began to notice intermittent crashes. After
running AMI Diag and other diagnostic programs I discovered bad memory block.
So the point here is get excellent ram! Micron!
DXR2 Encore
With the ram problem taken care of, I moved on to the next problem.
The DXR2 DVD decoder would lock the system. I called tech support at Creative
and they verified that they have been having problems with some Athlon system.
I removed the card and used a software decoder instead, thinking that the Athlon
was plenty fast enough. For some reason I was getting jerky playback. I tried
changing video drivers, different software decoders, etc. What I discovered
was that the Creative 2X DVD drive didn't like to be on the same channel as
the IDE burner. Slaved to the harddrive, playback was silk. I didn't want to
keep it this way because it dragged my harddrive down to Udma 33. I purchased
a Promise IDE controller and the problem was solved! DVD playback fixed.
Next Page
