Next Generation Motherboard Platforms - Part 2: Intel's 820

The 6CX is much further along the way, in terms of a motherboard that's ready for production, than the AX6C. The IDE connectors have already been color coded and the manual is on its production run as well.

The first thing you'll notice about the 6CX is that it does feature the "forbidden" ISA slot adjacent to the last PCI slot. The sole ISA slot is shared, meaning that either the ISA slot or the 5^th PCI slot can be occupied at one time, but not both. This allows the 6CX to offer the same 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP and 1 AMR slot as the other two boards we've looked at but, it also adds the option of using that single ISA slot, should the need arise.

The downside to the ISA slot is that it adds some cost to the production of the motherboard because a separate PCI-to-ISA bridge must be accounted for. While the addition of this does not raise the price of the motherboard to an extremely great degree, for those users that aren't ever going to use that ISA slot, it is more of a pointless investment on Gigabyte's part. This is of course debatable depending on the type of user you are, but it is a feature that you'll eventually see phased out.

The board is much more heavily populated with capacitors than both of the other boards we took a look at but if you recall from above, the Intel VC820 focuses entirely on stability and features less than a 1/3 of the capacitor count on the 6CX. It's quality, not quantity that counts here.

The three RIMM slots are standard on the 6CX, as they are on the previous two boards. It seems as if the 3 RIMM slot configuration will be the trend with i820 boards as it was with the BX boards towards the end of the chipset's reign as Intel's flagship desktop solution.

The AGP slot features an installed retention mechanism, which was the first implementation we have seen of the AGP retention mechanism thus far. You can expect this retention mechanism to become as standard as the Slot-1 CPU retention mechanism has become over the past two years. The AGP slot is separated from the CPU by the AMR slot which is an improvement for both cooling and for DIMM installation, as discussed above with the AOpen AX6C.

The 6CX is driven primarily by jumpers/dip switches (above right). The single set of four dip switches is the smallest dip switch block we've ever seen. You'll need a pin or something with a very tiny point to adjust those settings. Luckily the default setting is the 100/133MHz auto-detect, which should lessen the effects of such a poorly designed switch.

The 6CX features an on-board Aureal Vortex audio controller, which is also a hardware based controller. However, the truly interesting feature of the 6CX is the Dual BIOS that Gigabyte first introduced with the BX2000 board a few months ago. The Dual BIOS setup is basically what the name implies, there are two physical BIOS chips on-board the 6CX, should one fail, the other will take over. This is especially useful if you accidentally perform an incorrect flash on your BIOS and can't restore the original. While most users won't use this feature on a day to day basis (at least we hope not) for the few percent that do end up needing it, it is definitely worth the trouble.

In order to conserve space, the on-board battery was mounted vertically which allows for very easy installation/removal while not allowing the battery to slide out.

There is a provision for the front panel USB connector, but the front panel LED connector we saw on the VC820 isn't present on the 6CX just like it wasn't present on AOpen's board.