Gigabyte 7VAXP (KT400): Breathing Some Life Back into KT400

Final Words

There are a lot of good things we can say about the Gigabyte 7VAXP. For starters, it's a well-priced motherboard for what you get. Currently, you can purchase the Gigabyte 7VAXP for around $115 from a reputable vendor before any applicable taxes or shipping fees. Considering features like USB 2.0, Firewire, RAID, LAN, and "real" DDR400 support are included, this is quite the steal. The fact that we encountered no stability or reliability issues with this board in our stress tests is yet another good reason to buy this motherboard.

However, "most" people obviously doesn't include all the computer users out there. For the overclockers and cooling fanatics, they will be disappointed with this motherboard. In the overclocker's case, there's only an adjustable FSB up to 165MHz (or 200MHz via DIP switches), which you can't take real advantage of anyway due to the fact that there are no PCI divider options or an AGP/PCI lock available via the BIOS. In addition, for those overclockers that desire to unlock their Athlon XP, they will be very disappointed to learn that the 7VAXP has no multiplier options available in the BIOS or via jumpers on the motherboard. In the case of cooling fanatics, the Gigabyte 7VAXP lacks the four mounting holes that make the powerful Swiftech MCX and Alpha PAL series of heatsinks tick. Without a doubt, this will hurt the 7VAXP's prospects with cooling gurus.

Overall however, the Gigabyte 7VAXP offers enough features and performance at a good price to make us say that we were impressed with this product. Not even taking the features and DDR333 performance into perspective, we were also impressed that the Gigabyte 7VAXP is the only VIA KT400-powered motherboard that actually doesn't suffer a performance loss with DDR400 memory. The Gigabyte 7VAXP doesn't exactly gain a heck of a lot with DDR400 in most situations, but it's certainly better than nothing at all, that much is for sure.

We hope you enjoyed our coverage of the fastest KT400 board yet, the Gigabyte 7VAXP. Stay tuned for our upcoming KT400 roundup as well as nForce2 coverage.