Price: $120US
Get current pricing here

Website: www.gigabyte.com.tw

Now that AMD's "Thunderbird" Athlon has made it's way onto the market in fairly large quantities, the hunt is on for the perfect supporting platform. Each manufacturer targets their boards in different ways, offering value, performance, stability, or ideally, a well-balanced combination of the above. Since the Athlon's inception, stability and performance have been the main foci, since VIA's KX/KT133 chipsets seem to conflict in some way with each new video card or memory configuration. For this reason, choosing the right motherboard and memory is imperative.

When AMD unleashed the Thunderbird back in June, one of the first supporting manufacturers on the scene was Gigabyte with their 7ZM micro-ATX board. This initial offering was simplistic and didn't stand out in any way other than its availability, something that other manufacturers severely lacked. With the 7ZM on the market, Gigabyte had bought enough time to finish their full-length ATX solution, the 7ZX that we'll be looking at today.