| GA-6WXM Intel 810 DC-100 ATX Motherboard |
 7BW
Motherboard
Manufacturer
- Gigabyte
Thursday, May 04, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II Mendocino 333 Mhz Slot-1
64 Mb PC 100 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 build 4.10.1998
DirectX 6.2
General
The GA-6WXM is a Slot-1 based ATX mainboard with Intel 810 '
Whitney' chipset.
Package is
bundled with a Driver CD, cables and manual.
The profile
In the past we have tested Gigabyte's videocards with a lot of
pleasure. Gigabyte is well know for their high quality peripherals.
Recently, after a meeting here at the site we decided to expand the
site's reviews into a diversity of hardware. Therefore the outcome was
also to test and review motherboard. At the current time we will bring
you motherboard reviews from, SuperPower, Soyo, Asus and Gigabyte. The
first motherboard that we have gotten the opportunity to review is
their latest version of the GA-6WXM motherboard. This exceptional
motherboard is based around the latest Intel 810 chipset, the DC-100
version. Furthermore the primary 'extra's on this motherboard are
integrated DS3D Sound responsible from Yamaha with their 744 sound chip,
5 PCI slots, Ultra DMA 33 & 66, Dual Bios and a lot more related goods.
This motherboard is based upon the Intel 810 (DC-100) and thus has 2d/3d
videocard integrated in this chipset. The version of
the mobo we received is based up-on an ATX form factor solution.
The motherboard also has up-to-date features like a Ultra DMA 66,
AMR and USB devices. The mobo does not have ISA slots anymore, no AGP
slot (used by the integrated video sub-section) and has a luxury 5 PCI slots.
The review on this
mobo we will tell you a bit more then alone some technical aspects of
the motherboard alone, we will be using 3D benchmarks due to the nature of
integrated graphics and sound solution of this motherboard. We will
compare the power of this chipset to other chipsets and integrated
mobo solutions.
Whitney ? I heard her before, but what's that about?
You've all heard the
name Whitney floating around in tech land before. Whitney is simply
the codename for Intel's 810 chipset. As you probably have noticed,
the i810 motherboards will not come with an AGP-slot due to the
integrated nature of the mobo. Unfortunately this means that you can
only upgrade the to another graphics solution if you insert a PCI
graphics card. (you can choose to use PCI graphics in the bios).
However, a PCI graphics solution ... well those days are pretty much
over. The best at this time is a Voodoo3 2000 solution. Of course we
ran a lot of benchmarks on this motherboard to test the video quality.
I was very curious if indeed the DC-100 version of the I810 was faster
then its predecessor. (I've had the opportunity to read insiders info from Intel
about the newer chipset and have seen data-sheets and some preliminary
benchmark results, those were promising).
You can rest assure,
the DC-100 makes it's promises worthwhile. As you will see later
on in this review the benchmarks will result into a large increase of
acceleration even on a slower processor. This version of the
I810-DC100 now carries 4Mb 3D display cache to speed up the
acceleration process.
One other thing that
you will notice on the mobo are the missing ISA ports. So if you have
a lot of older 16Bit ISA cards then this mobo is a big no to you.
Personally I think that ISA is something of the past, and I'm very
happy to see that it has been slowly replaced by newer and faster port
solutions like PCI, AGP and USB.
Coming up: the
motherboard review continued
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