Major problems with Gigabyte 133A and G400

[Livius]

Oh, the funny thing is that while everyone reports better performance AND compatibility with AGP 4.17 driver set, in my case 4.20 is just as fast and more stable.

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Coppermine 500 FC-PGA (under overcloking tests)
Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X (133A); 128MB SDRAM; G400 16MB SH; Vortex2; WD Expert 20GB

[Compton]

Glad to hear you got it working with the Vortex card. I find ME to be much more stable than SE. Also I believe the Via drivers that come with it are better than SE or the 4 in 1 drivers. I only update the AGP driver and so far it's running very stable and I haven't had any kind of issues.

[Livius]

Anyway, there are a lot of problems with Gigabyte's version of the 133A - I had the chance to build another system based on it yesterday. I'd stay away from this board, regardless of what our friend Anand says about it. BTW, the new and more stable bios version F2 is also significantly slower at least where memory performance is concerned (about 10-12%).
You also get shutdown issues (I never imagined they could be so annoying to have your PC freeze when you try to shut it down). But that's what happens when you buy based on recommendations by major hardware sites who make millions from comercials. (I do not imply that they sell out, only that often to keep the flow of reviews steady they do them rather superficially.)
Thanks for the help.

Livius

[Thundrchez]

I've been avoiding Anandtech for a while. Some of his reviews are proof that he was bought out. The final straw for me was his i820 el Camino mobo reviews. He showed some charts how i820 with rambust was better than i820 with the mth + sdram, and stated that rambust + i820 was the way of the future. He completely failed to compare it to the current crop of 440bx mobos, which would have showed a performance decrease, especially so with a 133MHz oc'd 440bx.

Bought and sold, but not quite as bad as Clinton.