MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte GA-7VM400M

This board is the same as the 7VM400MF board we reviewed earlier (page 113, January 2004), except that this one doesn’t have a FireWire port. It’s a compact board integrated with all features necessary for SOHO. For the office user, it has onboard 10/100 Mbps Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports and onboard graphics while, for home users, it has onboard six-channel sound along with SPDIF digital output and an 8X AGP slot for adding a better graphics card. The board is based on the VIA KM400 chipset and supports Athlon XP processors. It has 333 MHz FSB and supports a maximum of 2 GB dual channel DDR memory.

We tested the board using an Athlon XP 3000+, with 512 MB RAM and 7200 rpm hard drive. It was tested with both onboard graphics as well as a GeForce4 Ti 4600AGP card with 128MB VRAM. Surprisingly, the board’s results weren’t as good as its MF version (results in the table). Overall, it’s a good buy. But if you can spend around 500 bucks more, then go for its MF version. This board has Norton Internet Security Suite 2003.

Siddharth Sharma