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Layout, or "What the heck is THAT doing there?"

You might guess from the board's size and plethora of features that its layout of would be quite packed and cramped, but you'd be only partially right. Through some miracle of engineering, Gigabyte has managed to do a great many things RIGHT with the layout of this board, in spite of its long list of features and limited spacing. This is no small achievement, since lesser boards have failed to satisify some of the most basic requirements. Though the slightly larger than average PCB size plays a role, another key to this would be the sacrifice of a PCI slot - the GA-7GAXP Ultra only has 5, which we felt was a reasonable trade-off for the extra room around the DIMM slots and the excellent placement of the IDE slots.

You'll note from the pictures that all 4 IDE slots are near the upper half of the motherboard, closer to your tower drive cages. You can also see that Gigabyte has managed to place the AGP slot slight under the DIMM sockets so that you can just get at your RAM without having to remove your video card. The space is tight, but it's there, which is more than we can say about a LOT of other motherboards.

The room around the CPU is fairly good for airflow and heat dissipation, this because there aren't any large obstructing elements like the power supply connector surrounding it. If you think this is a minor point, then I'd like to point out that we could FEEL a lot more heat coming off this board and out of the side of our test system's case. Normally, during our testing, a lot of that heat is trapped in and around that region that cups the CPU and heatsink.

With all this good stuff, there was bound to be SOMETHING to complain about. And there is. Simply, Gigabyte has the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees off its regular axis. This complicates installation and removal of most heatsinks once the board is installed into a case, because the heatsink clip is now closest to the PSU. Heatsinks that normally install more easily with a screwdriver as especially affected. We used a ThermalTake Volcano 9 during our review, and we couldn't possibly hope to safely remove and install the heatsink while the board was installed. Thankfully our trusty Lian Li PC60 case had a slide out tray, but the rotated CPU axis remains a nuisance.

Dip switches control clock multiplier.

By the way, if you look closely at the pictures, you might notice that the Gigabyte has dip switches. Now that sort of leaves a question mark in the air. Some of the dip switches control clock multiplier speeds, and we found the fact that those particular switches were located right beside the CPU to be a constant source of frustration. But more on this in our next section, where we take a look at the BIOS.