The end result of the conformity to AMD's reference design is that the Gigabyte Athlon board tends to feel somewhat bland compared to the hot-rod 440BX mainboards the company currently produces.

Even Gigabyte's "DualBIOS" system, which mounts not one but two BIOS chips on the company's 440BX boards in order to protect the system from viral attack, or a random failure, is not present on the GA-7IX.

Although the GA-7IX's standard featureset may not light up your pulse rate, it does bare mentioning that the board is very well equipped in its default form.

Five PCI slots combined with two ISA slots and the mandatory AGP slot add up to a board that's capable of supporting a plethora of add-in devices. Three DIMM slots are also included on the GA-7IX, supporting up to 768MB of ECC SDRAM. We also like the fact that Gigabyte has incorporated advanced hardware monitoring for fan/heat awareness at all times on the board, although this is required less for most consumers than in recent 440BX boards since they likely won't be overclocking their Athlon CPUs anytime soon.

As with all mainboards based on the AMD-750 chipset, UDMA/66 support for hard drives is fully represented on the GA-7IX. We tested the board with two models of the Western Digital Expert line of UDMA/66 hard drives and found they operated within the specified parameters as described by Western Digital. This was while using the newest beta build of IDE busmastering drivers produced by AMD, which should be made public within the next week.

Installing the Athlon mainboard proved to be as easy as installing Gigabyte's 440BX boards have been in the past. It is strange inserting the deja-vu inducing Athlon CPU into its host board, both of which look identical to a Pentium II/440BX-based system from last year.

After a stroll down Pentium II memory lane, the GA-7IX installed correctly and booted up on its first attempt…always a good sign when dealing with an early hardware example.

We didn't receive Gigabyte's final draft of the manual that will be included with the GA-7IX before we concluded this write up, but the early draft that we did receive proved to be well written and illustrated properly. We've found that Gigabyte's manuals haveonly improved over the past year, and we expect that trend to continue in their second half 1999 product line.