It's interesting to note that the GA-7DX comes with a fan/heat sink combo mounted on the northbridge. The AMD 761 northbridge is a hot running chip, but can survive with a heat sink only. The fan should help when you attempt to overclock the FSB.

Gigabyte decided to skip AMD's southbridge and instead use VIA's 686B, a fully modern and fully featured southbridge, than includes ATA/100, AC '97 audio, and two USB masters. Gigabyte added an AC '97 supporting Creative CT5880 chip in order to add four channels of audio to the board. The AMD 761 northbridge and VIA 686B make a powerful chipset when put together.

The GA-7DX carries two memory slots, which should be enough for most users. Few people need more than 2GB of memory. The only problem you may run into is if you make incremental updates over time. You may, at some point, end up throwing away a DIMM to replace it with something larger.

Five PCI slots provide plenty of upgradeability and the AMR slot will work with inexpensive AMR modems and save you a PCI slot. However, the board we received for testing did not have an AMR modem. You may want to confirm that any model you buy does have the AMR slot.