What's in the box?

It seems that all of today's Mainboard companies enjoy putting the same things in all of their boxes. In Gigabyte's box you'll find the board (make sure that's there, it's very important), a driver disk, a couple of IDE cables, and of course the manual. The manual included in the box is not bad, instructions on how to install the Mainboard, as well as detailed information for almost every feature in the BIOS is present.

Installation

Being of Micro-ATX form factor there shouldn't be any problems fitting the GA-7VM in any standard case. The board was so tiny in fact that, it looked very out of place installed in our rather large test computer's case. Oddly this board still uses age-old dipswitches to control FSB (front side bus) speed settings. With most major Mainboard manufacturers using totally BIOS driven controls I expected a little more from Gigabyte. Once all was said and done, we had a 750MHz Athlon, 1 stick of PC100 SRAM, an Elsa Gladiac GeForce2, and a modem, an ATA/66 HD, and a 12x CD-ROM drive all plugged in ready to go.

Upon my first boot-up windows prompted me for the driver disk, which I swiftly inserted into the CD-ROM drive. After all was setup, and properly installed on our Windows98 test bed, I rebooted one last time, and dove right into the BIOS to see what this little sucker could do.

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