GA-7ZXE Recommedations

[Scott Tiger]

I'm in need of an older Socket A mobo that has the ability to take pc133. Doesn't need to be top of the line or have RAID but onboard sound would be nice. I know that it's recommended to use DDR now for top performance but I've already got nearly a gig of cas2 pc133 and don't want to give it up yet.

The board I've been looking at is the GA-7ZXE at MWave. Here are the specs:

http://direct.mwave.com/mwave/doc2/a14701.html

Any thoughts? I've never owned a Gigabyte and don't know much about their quality. Right now I'm fighting a flaky ECS and don't want to repeat that mistake again. The price on the board is about $52 + freight. Whatever I get I'd like to get it from a reputable dealer and I think MWave is definitely one to go with.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Oh, the only OS that will likely run on this box will be some version of Linux. Probably either Debian, Gentoo, or Slack.

Thanks in Advance.

Shawn

[Scott Tiger]

^^BUMP^^

[bill1971]

Hey,Shawn:
Which ECS board is it, that's "flaky"? K7S5A or some other? So far,
the only Giga-byte I have experience with is for a P4. Looks to be
well-made, and gotten good reviews. I have heard of one or two
Giga-byte boards in this forum that seemed to be "squirrell-y."
I'm sure someone will post about it.

YGPM

- Bill

[Dourden]

Giga-byte boards in my experience are OK. They aren't the best but they aren't plain trash either (i.e ECS, Chaintech, or PC Chips). It is a decent board if you aren't looking to spend much and want something pretty stable. I have used Giga-byte in the past in certain cases depending on who I am building a system for. Mostly I use Abit, Asus, Epox, Soyo, Giga-byte generally in that order of preference. Abits are very good boards kinda uppercrust without the uppercrust price in my opinion. Hope that helps you out some.

[Scott Tiger]

Thanks Dourden, that's the info I was looking for. I know this is a crap-shoot but I want to know if the board is going to be stable and run reliably for a few years. Don't need or expect to get a screamer - particularly by today's standards - but it does need to run well. Also don't need to overclock it either.

Bill, the board in question is a ECS P6VAP -AP and it's throwing fits with the hard drive it has installed (which is a 15 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm drive). I've run into the Maxtor diagnostic tools on the hd and it checks out fine. I've run Memtest86 on the RAM (768 megs) and it checks out fine too. The only thing left to suspect is the PSU but I don't think that's the problem either. When I got the board new about a month ago I had to upgrade the BIOS just to get it to recognize the HD. The was a documented problem with the ECS and the BIOS upgrade was supposed to fix it. I loaded Slack and let it run on the box without having to reboot it for several weeks but after rebooting it the BIOS screen would flash black to white and black again. It's not a video card problem for sure because when it didn't flash the hd auto detect utility on the mobo would display strange symbols for hd indentification and recognize it as 136 gb. Run auto detect again and it detect it at 6,000 something megs. After the third try it would usually detect at it's proper size. The bios upgrade went as well so I don't suspect that as the problem.

I've also changed the IDE cable (yes, it's an 80 pin IDE cable) and checked the jumpers on the hd to see if there's a problem there.

I've also unplugged the box from the wall and removed the cmos battery overnight to see if it would correct itself. No luck. I think it's just a flaky board. The proc is only a month old so I don't suspect that either.

You'll notice that the board in question is an Intel board but I think I'll upgrade to an AMD since the cost of them is so low. I'd like to use the RAM though so finding an ATA100 capable mobo with a 266 mhz fsb would be a good thing. The think I like about the Gigabyte I've listed is that you can get it with all the features I've listed for under $60 and if you go with the combo deal you can get it with a 160+ for ~ $125 shipped. Not a bad deal to me.

I'd love to hear suggestions but I think upgrading is the path I'd like to take. I'm just having a hard time picking out a nice mobo for the price with the features already mentioned up above.

Thanks again,

Shawn

[Scott Tiger]

I've been searching the Gigabyte site and it looks like they've updated the BIOS for the board I'm asking about to take an AMD 2600+. Doubt I'll ever put that into the board but it's nice to know that the manufacturer is standing behind their products. Can't find too much else about the board on Google though.

Any suggestions?

[Cyclone2]

I have a GA 7zxr and a P4 giga byte board and they are both stable and have had zero problems with them.

They are business type boards= stable etc but not for overclocking

[Scott Tiger]

That's really what I wanted to hear. Thanks Cyclone. I think that's what I'm going to get...

I just purchased a GA-7ZXE last weekend. So far it's doing okay.

My only complaint is the fact that it locked up when loading XP Pro on it. Same place everytime. I wasn't sure if it was my old KyroI that was doing it, or the onboard audio.

Instead of messing, I took out the KyroI and disabled the onboard audio, worked fine then.

I'm in the process of loading XP again, with the audio enabled to see if it's what caused it to lock up last time.

What's funny, is it kept locking up on the screen that said Windows XP was "more reliable". LOL! Yeah right! And there's a sticker on the box that says "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"!

I'm sure you're distance with Linux will be a little different.

EDIT - Oh yeah, I have an old GA-5AX as well. It's running a K6-2/450, OC'd to 5X112=560MHz!

EDIT2 - Update on installing XP. I had to disble the "Legacy" audio in order for XP to install.

[Scott Tiger]

Thanks EvilRick sounds like Gigabyte boards will last for a while too... I'm going to go ahead and order that board and a 1600+ to go with it. (Mwave has a nice bundle deal) Good to hear that you finally got XP to install on it. I doubt I'll be running anything but Slackware on this board though. I've got XP Pro on the system I'm using right now and have been dual - booting with two 40 gig hd's. Think I'll just take one of the 40's out and put it in the box with the Gigabyte board. With a decent video card I should be doing well with it.

As for the 15 gig Maxtor - I've got an old Azza motherboard that shoud take the Intel proc (but has a 384 meg ram limit - Whatever!) and run Debian on it.

Thanks for the info guys.

Shawn