As usual, when we get a new product here in the
lab we give it a thorough visual inspection. Just by looking at the GA-6OXM7E it is obvious that much thought was put into the design and layout of this board. The craftsmanship and overall quality of all the traces, solder points and
all the mounted components was excellent.
Besides the cool blue PCB, the first thing we noticed was the abundant array of capacitors and coils
surrounding the Socket 370 connector.
To put
thing in the most basic of ways, the more
capacitors filtering the power to the processor,
the better! Smooth clean power equates to
excellent stability. The GA-6OXM7E proved to
be very stable throughout testing. We did
not experience a single crash until we pushed our
processor way beyond it's rated specification.
Finally!
With the introduction of the i815, we're finally
beginning to see motherboards with our favorite
slot configuration. The GA-6OXM7E comes with
a single AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and a single CNR
slot. ISA slots will soon be nothing more
than a fond memory....
Another
welcome feature is the on-board Creative Labs
audio. Most other motherboards ship with a
basic AC-97 compatible chip but not the
GA-6OXM7E. Most power users will still opt
for a more powerful add-in sound card but the
on-board sound is more than adequate for most
tasks. Once we had our test system up an
running we actually played a little F.A.K.K. 2
using the on-board sound and it worked
great. Also notice the excellent placement
of the audio connectors. We've seen these
audio connectors at all different locations on
many boards but Gigabyte's placement is the best
so far. They are out of the way of all slots
and components and they are placed high on the
board so users should have no problems with the
length of their CD-Rom audio cables. I can't
tell you how many times I've have to move a sound
card to a different slot because an audio cable
wouldn't reach!
Gigabyte
has been implementing a feature they call DualBIOS
on many of their "higher"-end boards.
The
second BIOS chip you see in the picture above
basically acts as a backup for the main
chip. Should you encounter an error during
flashing or have your BIOS damaged by a virus like
the C.I.H. virus, you can easily recover the
system by restoring the data from the second
chip. This is a great feature and virtually
eliminates downtime due to a BIOS problem.
Lastly,
we just want to show you the plethora of
connectors on the edge of the board.
There
are connectors for the Smart Card reader, front
USB ports, Fan Headers and a slew of others.
The GA-6OXM7E gets an "A" in the
"Bells and Whistles" department! |
