I have to confess that Gigabyte's motherboard naming conventions have always struck me as mind-numbing. Certainly Tyan's S2466N-4M is a mouthful, but at least you can call it a Tiger MPX. The GA-7DPXDW-P is an especially confusing Gigabyte motherboard, however, because it's recently undergone a name change that hasn't completely "taken" yet. Take for instance Gigabyte's website, which lists three different 760MPX boards (GA-7DPXDW-C, GA-7DPXDW and GA-7DPXDW+) none of which is the GA-7DPXDW-P I have here.

I contacted Gigabyte for clarification and was told the following: First, the GA-7DPXDW-P used to be called the GA-7DPXDW+, and the P in the new name actually stands for the word plus. I also asked about the differences between the three boards listed on the web page, and here's the skinny: The GA-7DPXDW-C is a more value-oriented board that lacks the Promise RAID feature. The difference between the GA-7DPXDW and the GA-7DPXDW-P is more subtle: the former has RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 with ATA-100, while the latter supports only RAID 0 and RAID 1, but with ATA-133. So now you know.

The Gigabyte has all the "standard" features described in the preceding Tiger MPX section, save the four 32-bit PCI slots; the GA-7DPXDW-P has only three of those. However, the Gigabyte board brings several new features to the table. First off, the GA-7DPXDW-P has an AGP pro slot, to better support high-end workstation graphics cards.

Like the Tyan, the GA-7DPXDW-P has 10/100 Ethernet, but the Gigabyte uses an Intel controller chip instead of a 3Com. The presence of an Intel NIC chip on an AMD chipset motherboard is of course quite ironic, even more so when you consider that two of the four boards featured here use Intel Ethernet controllers.

Also present are on-board AC97 audio and on-board Promise RAID. The RAID chip is a Promise PDC20276; you can read about it here. Basically, the chip supports ATA/133 and either RAID 0 or RAID 1, but not RAID 10. The controller can be jumpered for RAID or simple ATA-133 support; a BIOS setting enables or disables the controller entirely. The Gigabyte is the only board in the round up with RAID or ATA-133 capability.

The north bridge heatsink on the GA-DPXDW-P is a heatsink/fan combination. I'm not terribly fond of active cooling on north bridge heatsinks. I see them as one more fan to make noise and perhaps fail eventually. Having said that, Gigabyte at least did a good job on the heatsink. It's fairly tall, with cross-cut fins that allow for lots of surface area. I've seen plenty of motherboards that use the fan as an excuse for a paper-thin heatsink, and Gigabyte definitely didn't take that shortcut.

The GA-7DPXDW-P board comes with a floppy cable, three ATA-100 IDE cables, and a floppy disk containing drivers for the Promise controller. Also included are a drivers CD (labeled for the GA-7DPXDW+) and an I/O shield that fits the board's port configuration. The latter is an important inclusion, as the Gigabyte board has a somewhat non-standard port configuration, so the I/O shields that come with most cases won't fit. Finally, I assume an instruction manual is included, though there wasn't one in the board I received. If you find yourself in the same situation, a PDF version of the manual is available on Gigabyte's web site. The manual that I downloaded was approximately 70 pages long and covered BIOS and jumper settings and hardware and drivers installation in good detail.

The GA-7DPXDW-P BIOS offers memory tweaking options not available with the Tiger MPX, including the following:

• Idle cycle limit
• Page hit limit
• Trc cycle
• Trp cycle
• Tras cycle
• CAS latency cycle
• Trcd cycle

These options allow the user to set more aggressive memory timings, and should result in an increase in memory bandwidth. Other nice settings include a console redirection option like the Tiger MPX, and a wide variety of BIOS-level monitoring options. The BIOS allows you to configure warnings for both CPU fans and the system fan, as well as separate shutdown thresholds for each CPU, configurable from 80C/176F to 105C/221F in 5C/9F increments. I'll go into more detail about the Gigabyte's overclocking abilities later on, but I would place it above the Tyan but below the two other boards in this area.

The CD that accompanies the GA-7DPXDW-P includes a variety of software. There are drivers for the chipset and the Intel Ethernet controller, as well as a number of other utilities. Acrobat Reader is included, as is a PDF copy of the User's Guide. Noteworthy utilities include a Windows-based BIOS writer which can update the BIOS on the board without having to reboot to DOS, and hardware monitoring software. The monitor program will display voltages and fan speeds in real-time, as well as information on hard drive space and memory usage. However, there are no facilities for setting thresholds for any of these values that will warn the user or shut down the system in the event of an emergency.

With the GA-7DPXDW-P, Gigabyte has started with the standard features expected on a 760MPX board and expanded considerably. The addition of an Intel Ethernet controller, on-board audio, and on-board Promise IDE RAID make this board a compelling choice. Those looking to run a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array should look especially hard at this board, since it will enable them to forego purchasing a RAID controller.