From experience, I am confident about buying Gigabyte motherboards. My board of the last year and a half was a Gigabyte, it was an exceptional performer, but it didn’t overclock. Back then, though, I wasn’t interested in such things and since it only cost £35 I was very happy with it. So the logical choice for this years board was Gigabyte.

My new toy the GA-7VA r2, from their budget range, cost me just £43 from dabs.com - again great value from Gigabyte. It sports AGP 8x, DDR400 and a Via KT400A chipset, as is proclaimed by the stickers on the less than inspiring box.

The old and the new
(well, in this picture, it’s the new and the old… I’m sure you worked that out!)

Upon opening the box, the package inside is very basic: the board, an instruction manual, and a set of floppy disk and hard disk cables (both which are flat ribbon cables) - all of them essential, but nothing special there. On the bonus side there is a very useful sticker with all the jumper settings to stick to the inside of the case. Handy!

Delving further inside I grabbed the motherboard, quite nice to find one of these in a motherboard box, and fit it straight into my case. There were no problems, its all the standard sizes, and the heat sink clips are easy to work with. On the ports side, it sports a comprehensive feature set. There's a bank of USB 2.0 sockets, all 2 of them, but it does come with a back plate for another 2. The board layout is quite sensible apart from the fact that to remove the memory you have to take out the graphics card, especially with the bigger cards like the FX’s. A lot of modern boards suffer from this problem, it really is quite an irritating "feature".

Focus is a little off, but you get the idea...

It has plenty of ports on the back, if you like legacy devices. Great, got me covered then, I’m still living in the past as far as all these new connections are concerned! The obligatory 2 PS/2 ports are present, with the 2 USB 2.0 next to them. Notice the mountings for, but lack of, the built in network port; this does however come fitted on the XP version of the board.

There are 2 serial ports with a parallel on top, harking back to more traditional ATX setups. Some of the newer board designs elect to miss out of one (if not both) of the serial ports, which irritates me immensely as I have a digital camera and Psion both of which connect via serial ports. And then there's my trusty old parallel printer to think about. I think it's nice that Gigabyte have stuck to convention rather than daring to be different like some of the recent Abit boards - most of us still use these older legacy ports.

The board itself looks nice, it has a blue PCB, with green socket and AGP slot, even the DIMMS are coloured purple, not the best colour in the world, but better than white plastic. The board has colour coded header connections, which is an immense help as the manual is less than clear on what connector is for what.

Right, now that we’ve had a look at the board and it’s features, on to the results of some benchmarking to see how it performs.

For testing I fitted an AMD Athlon 2500+ along with 512 MB of PC2700 Crucial RAM and, my pride and joy, a GeForce FX 5900LX hacked to a 5950Ultra. Providing the storage is my ancient 30gb 5400rpm hard disk, the height of technology… unfortunately this is the only hard disk I was able to test with.

First up were the SiSoft Sandra tests. I ran two tests from the comprehensive suite of tools provided by Sandra, the “CPU Arithmetic Benchmark” and the “Memory Bandwidth Benchmark”.

The CPU Arithmetic benchmark tests how well the CPU can add up, giving you a comparable result with other systems. Although the score is very related to the CPU used, your going to get a pretty low score with a bad chipset.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic test

These are the test results for the CPU Arithmetic benchmark. They show that the 2500+, as expected falls behind the 2800+ in both tests. A rather more interesting result is that the 2500+ is equal to Pentium 4 2.8B (non hyper-threading) CPU. This may seem weird, but I know this to be true in real life, my system is about equal to my friends P4 2.8 system in benchmarks like this. What we have to remember with this, is that these scores are only Sandra’s default scores, and would not account for any tweakage and must have a margin of error in them, because no two Mobo/chipset combinations are alike. This could be why the 2500+ is shown as considerably faster than the P4 2.4B, especially in the Whetstone test. Note that I would have included a reference 2500+ system but Sandra did not offer one (or my version didn’t anyway).

SiSoft Sandra Bandwidth test

The results for the memory benchmark again provide interesting results. It shows the KT400A to be approximately equal to the nForce2 chipset with PC2700 memory in it. Unsurprisingly, our KT400A falls considerably behind the nForce2 when it gains some PC3200 memory (and a higher FSB cpu). The chipset catches up a lot of the distance when fitted with similar PC3200 RAM and a 400FSB chip.

This test does, however show that it is considerably behind its bigger brother (the KT600) in the memory department. This graph suggests the KT600 is a very worthy contender to the nForce2 chipset, perhaps we’ll get a KT600 board for test on the site some time soon. There’s life in socket A yet!

All round then, these are some good scores for the KT400A chipset.

The next test run was 3dMark 2001. This is a Graphics test, but the CPU used also very heavily affects it. I ran the test at 1024x768.

It returned a rather low score of just 13183. This is however considerably more than the 4500 marks returned with the GeForce4 MX card I also tested in the board.

3dMark 2003 returned much more positive results, scoring 5384, and an amazing 32.5fps in mother nature.

Considering the fairly lowly memory used with it, this is a quite impressive score. This score is equal to that being returned by users of the nForce2 and KT600 chipsets.

Overclocking

This board has a fairly modest array of overclocking utilities, but Gigabyte have made an effort. Perhaps most initially impressive is the windows based “EasyTune4” software allowing FSB modifications within Windows. Sounds good, but in practice the results you get from it are fairly useless. I advise you drop it and go back to the bios.

The bios features pretty standard configuration options as modern boards go. As you can see, the FSB can be altered and the DRAM clock can be changed to standard values. Voltage is controlled using a percentage increase rather than real values, which is a little strange but it does the job. The maximum increase is 10%, but the bios does not tell you what actual value you have gained. I really don’t like this feature very much, why use this method when everyone else simply has selectable voltage values?

As the image shows, the PCI/AGP frequencies change along with the FSB. This is unfortunate, as it really stifles FSB overclocking. So far, the nForce2 boards are still the only ones to offer a PCI/AGP frequency lock giving them a massive advantage. C’mon VIA, catch up!

BIOS Frequency/Voltage Controls

On my first attempt I got it to post at 174FSB / 348… unfortunately at this point my memory gave up. Thankfully to clear CMOS on this machine is very simple, disconnect the power and take out the battery. However, if you turn up the FSB and it doesn’t POST, then all you have to do is leave it 20 seconds and it returns the FSB to normal automagically. A word of advice though, it doesn’t reset the voltages. You can see in my photo the FSB set at 204 – it isn’t really running at that, but this shows the maximum FSB without pumping the AGP/PCI bus too high. The board will go up to 250 FSB but it’s unlikely many peoples’ AGP/PCI cards would put up with the rates up there.

Another thing to take note of is the passive, and very small, Northbridge cooler. It is not a problem for normal use, when running at stock, but for overclocking you may want replace it or at least make sure it has some focused airflow.

The highest overclock I managed was the FSB at 204mhz and the memory at 333mhz by convincing it it was PC 2100 and overclocking from there. The main reason I couldn’t clock beyond this was the week 39+ 2500 I was using, as well as the fact that I have a 300watt PSU which gets a little strained by all my efforts.

Conclusion:

Gigabyte have produced a fairly solid board in the GA-7VA revision 2. It has all the basic features you could want, runs stably, and even caters to some basic overclocking. It is however missing the extras that many boards these days now bundle like Ethernet, Graphics or Serial ATA connectors. It does however sport an on-board Audio chip.

As mentioned earlier, don’t expect it to overclock well since you can’t lock the PCI/AGP speeds. This is no fault of the Gigabyte board, instead VIA who still haven’t produced a chipset with this feature. nForce will continue to rule for overclockers until someone else integrates this feature.

It’s very easy to build a cheap, well performing system with especially as those colour coded front panel connectors help out sooo much – a strange feature to highlight perhaps but it really is an excellent idea and I haven’t seen it done by anyone else, yet. I recommend this board for those who don’t care for overclocking (which must still be the majority of people!) and want a simple easy to setup board with minimal fuss and bother. On those counts, this is a great motherboard.

It’s very cheap
It’s a great performer out of the box
It has excellent build quality

It’s not for overclockers, or those with 400FSB CPU’s
You don’t get much in the way of a package with it.
Only 2 USB 2.0 sockets built in (with 2 additional on a bracket)

Related:
Gigabyte website.
Specifications for the board.