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Test platforms

Gigabyte GA-7DX

This board was supplied together with the Athlon XP by AMD, featuring the AMD 761 North Bridge together with the VIA VT82C686B South Bridge. The board sports 2 DDR DIMM slots, otherwise it uses a 5/1/1 (PCI/AGP/AMR) configuration. A very clean layout, high quality components and on-board Creative CT5880 sound chip are the strong aspects of the GA-7DX. The board allows both jumperless and hardware-based (dip switches) manipulation of the front side bus (only up to 133 MHz through switches) and comes with Gigabyte's EasyTune utility for Windows-based overclocking on the fly. The manual of the GA-7DX is excellent and the BIOS allows fine-tuning of all relevant performance parameters.

Gigabyte GA-7DX

AMD 761-based mainboard supplied by AMD

On the downside, the performance of the Gigabyte 7DX was noticeably lower in gaming applications than what we saw with the VIA reference board.

VIA KT266A Reference Board

The VIA KT266A reference board has been reviewed in more detail in an earlier review. Briefly, we are looking at a MicroATX board featuring 2 PCI slots, one ACR and one AGP interface. With the increased IOQ depth to support a burst of 8 as opposed to burst of 4 in the original VIA KT266 chipset, the new chipset almost doubles the raw bandwidth of the memory bus. Unfortunately, the board has no BIOS support for the Athlon XP, meaning that SSE instructions are not used. This further means that while the VIA reference board outperformed the Gigabyte GA-7DX in 3D games, it only delivered about half of the possible performance in SSE-optimized applications like Caligari TrueSpace 4.2 D3D and OpenGL.

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