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Gigabyte's
GA-BX2000
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Dual
BIOS Slot 1 Pentium II/III Motherboard
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| Gigabyte
has long been a manufacturer of top shelf PC motherboards and have a
huge network in the various reseller channels. Many small clone
shops use Gigabyte's boards because of their aggressive pricing and
high quality. Gigabyte has always done things a little different
from the rest of the pack. For instance they are the only
motherboard manufacturer that I am aware of that uses dip switches
in their product for clock setting etc... There latest creation, the
BX2000 is an Intel BX chipset based Slot 1 board with a unique
safety feature called "Dual BIOS". |
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two red arrows are pointing at the two BIOS chips that are on the
board. One chip is intended to be a backup in case the other gets
corrupted. These chips are soldered to the board. In traditional
motherboards, if you corrupt or damage your BIOS, you have to pull
the BIOS chip (usually socketed) and replace it with a good chip.
This can be a royal pain in the butt. I went through that once
personally and was very lucky the motherboard manufacturer at the
time, decided to send me a new chip. You may not get so lucky.
Unless of course you own the BX2000. If you primary BIOS is
corrupted, the system automatically switches over to the secondary
chip and boots with default settings. This is a nice feature that
you will hopefully never have to use but it is there if you need it.
Here are some additional specs on the BX2000. |
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PROCESSOR
- Intel®
Pentium® II / III and Celeron? Processor 233 to 550 MHz
- Slot 1 for
future Processor support
- 66/75*/83*/100/112*/124*/133*
MHz System Bus
- Auto Detect
CPU Voltage
- Clock
multiplier 3.0/3.5 ...... / 6.5
CHIPSET
- Intel® 440
BX AGPset
- iTE 8671 I/Oset
- Winbond 83782
Health Chip
DRAM
- 8MB to 1GB
DRAM size
- 4 x 3.3V DIMM
size
- Supports
8/16/32/64/128/256 MB SDRAM DIMM Module
- Supports ECC
Type DIMM Module (72 bits)
- 1 x AGP Slot
Supports 66/133 MHz speeds
- 5 x PCI Slot
Supports 33MHz & PCI 2.2 compliant
- 2 x ISA Slot
I/O
- 2 x Ultra
DMA/33 Bus Master IDE ports on board
- 1 x FDD, 2 x
COM, 1 x LPT, PS/2 Keyboard, PS/2 Mouse on board
- 2 x USB ports
on board
- IrDA TX / RX
Header (optional)
POWER
- ATX Power
connector
- Power-on by
K/B, PS/2 Mouse, LAN, RTC, Modem (COM A or B) & Switch
- Power-off by
Windows® 98 Shut down & Switch
- AC Recovery
ON/OFF control
- Stop CPU Fan
during entering suspend mode
- 3 Level ACPI
LED Support
FORM
FACTOR
- ATX , 4 layer
PCB (30.7*19.2cm)
PROTECTION
- Flexible
Temperature sensor under processor Heatsink
- Auto speed
down and Alarm when CPU overheat or Fan failure
- System Health
status detect & report by BIOS, LDCM®, SIV.
- Hardware
Detects +/- 5v, +/-12v, CPU Voltage & CMOS battery Status
BIOS
- Includes
DualBIOS? Technology; 2Mbit Flash RAM
- AWARD BIOS
with Enhanced ACPI Feature for PC98 / Win98 Compliance, Green,
PnP, DMI, INT13 (>8.4GB) & Anti-Virus functions
- IDE#1~#4,
SCSI, LS120, ZIP & CD-ROM bootable
- Auto-detect
& report system health status
OTHER
FEATURES
- Suspend-To-RAM
(STR)
- Includes Wake
On LAN Header (WOL) & SB-LINKTM connector
- On board PC
speaker; Supports Internal / External modem wake on
- 3 Fan Power
& Speed Detection Connectors; Case open Detection
- Poly fuse for
keyboard overcurrent protection
DRIVER
- Intel® LDCM®
utility, SIV utility
- Ultra DMA/33
Bus Master IDE Driver (Xstore Pro, Triones & Intel® )
- Intel®
PIIX4e Patch Utility for Windows® 95
- TREND MICRO
PC-cillin 98 Anti-Virus utility (scan only)
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| How
many more bell and whistles do you want? This board has it all
except the elusive core voltage setting for the CPU. There aren't
many manufacturers that offer it but it would have been a nice
complement to this full featured board. Also, this board doesn't
have a BIOS CPU set up routine but it does have a nice dip switch
(the blue component in the picture above) that sets up the CPU. This
was MUCH easier to use than jumpers. We were also able to reset the
swtich easily once the board was installed in our case. OK, it's
test drive time! |
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Our
Test System
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium 2 -333 Overclocked to 500, Gigabyte
BX2000 Motherboard,
64 MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, Maxtor 17 Gig, 9.5 ms 5400 RPM EIDE UDMA
Hard Drive, STB Velocity 4400 TNT w/ 16 MB AGP Video Card, Monster
Sound MX300 PCI Audio Card, Memorex 482E 48X CDROM, TNT Detonator
Drivers, Win 98, DX6.1
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Overclocking
The BX2000 was
very strong in this department. It overclocked our Pentium 2-333 to
500 MHz. but no higher. The next jump would have been 560 which our
P2-333 has never seen before. If only Gigabyte threw in a few more
FSB frequencies, we could have squeaked out 525 perhaps.
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Benchmarks
| Winbench
99 Results |
Gigabyte
BX2000 |
| WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
1490
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| WinBench
99/Business Graphics WinMark 99 |
193
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| WinBench
99/CPUmark32 |
1270
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| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
1490
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| WinBench
99/FPU WinMark |
2560
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| These
are very impressive CPUmark numbers. They are the best I have seen
at 500 MHz. The FPU mark numbers look great as well and the highest
score I have seen in that department is 2570. The diskmark numbers
are fairly solid with the Maxtor drive we used. This board performed
well but that is to be expected with most BX based boards. |
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Overall
Impression
The BX2000 is a
fine, full featured motherboard. The quality and design are
excellent and performance across the standard benchmarks in the top
5% of it class. We would have liked a few more overclocking features
with voltage adjust and more clock frequencies but these are not
absolute necessity for the modest overclocker. The Dual BIOS feature
is a nice insurance policy and adds very little cost to the board. I
feel comfortable recommending this board as a base for any new
system you would build.
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The Gigabyte
BX2000 gets a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter Rating of....
85
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| -Davo |
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