GIGABYTE GA-8TRX330-L Pentium 4 Motherboard

BIOS Configuration:

The BIOS has all the usual features and options that one would find in most motherboards. Most of the advanced options are hidden until the user presses CTRL-F1 in the main BIOS screen. There is an option for "Top Performance" to enable/disable, however there is no documentation telling what this option does. We enabled it during testing and didn't experience any ill effects.

Overclockers will notice very quickly the lack of voltage controls for the CPU & memory. Also the BIOS only allows the FSB to be increased to 232 FSB (for 200FSB CPUs). Also in the PC Health Status menu, it doesn't tell you the exact voltages, merely that they are "OK". The screen does give the CPU temperature and fan RPM speeds.

One feature that was included was the ability to adjust memory timings and speeds. One problem I had initially was that my memory was only running at 333DDR instead of 400DDR, after trying several sticks of RAM and flashing to the latest BIOS, I finally went and checked the Gigabyte website. Apparently the ATI RX330 chipset will only run single sided DDR modules at 400DDR, double sided modules will only run at 333DDR. Being that this is a chipset limitation, there is nothing Gigabyte can do. For ATI to be a serious chipset competitor issues like these must be overcome in the near future. Fortunately I was able to find one pair of single sided memory among my PCs so that I could conduct the tests at the proper speed.