Ga-7dxr+

What do you guys think of this board? Has Promise raid on-board which I think is pretty cool and it was only 29 shipped from newegg, refurbished.

I know there's a bios that will allow me to run this as a 2600 cpu, but is there one that changes the PCI lock so I can do 166fsb?

Also, sound quality isn't the best but I can definately deal with it for the price.

The sound isn't that bad. It uses a chip from creative and I can't tell the difference between it and my SBLive5.1. The only thing about the RAID is the lowest block size is 64k. So unless you're doing video editing you're not gonna notice a big boost in harddrive speed. It will however help when there's a big harddrive load.
As for the FSB the max FSB in spec is 133. It uses the AMD 761 chipset so it doesn't have a 5 divider. I got up mine up to 166 stable when I borrowed my friend's TbredB and PC2700 Ram. If you wanna use 166FSB on this board. Use the RAID IDEs and change the NB Cooler.

Now that you mention it, mine sounds distorted and very crappy overall to soundstorm on my ASUS A7N8X deluxe.

Since I'm using this for a server/workstation, I don't really mind.

Bumped the FSB to 140, running stable as ever.


Would I be able to use my CDROM on the Promise IDE? Also, do I have to pull my PCI cards (ethernet and firewire/usb card)?

I can't remember but I think you can use the RAID Controller as an IDE controller just change it in the bios from RAID to IDE. At 140 You don't have to worry just yet. I was at 147 for a while but my chip was a tad hot because I had to pump 1.85v in to it to make it stable. I just normally run 142 with a 1.775v core.

Two suggestions;

Do not use the sound driver provided by gigabyte, it makes the sound very dull like it has low treble. Intead use the on XP provides and then use windows update if you want the newest.

Also you can get a hacked bios from lumberjacker.de to correct the raid problem with the "64k" stripe. With this bios it will turn your raid chip into an emulated TX2000 and quite franky the scores are very very close to the real TX2000.

As you have found, the AMD761 does not have any kind of a 1/5 divider so overclocking is very limited and for what this board was made for it was not really designed to overclock much. This board works flawlessly and is the most stable socket A board out there it used with crucial registerd ECC DDR.

Damn that's a nice find. On the raid I agree the board isn't an overclocking board but at stock speed it's pretty fast. I got get bandwidth efficiency of 85% or better so the memory controller was pretty good.