Gigabyte gives us a lot to talk about. The board is laid out pretty well. The first thing you probably notice is the active cooling on the Northbridge. I wouldn't consider this as always necessary but under certain circumstances (FSB overclocking for example), keeping that northbridge cooler can have a dramatic impact on stability.

Both CPU sockets have a line of capacitors (3300uF) that you'll have to contend with when installing your heatsinks. It can be an adventure, but I had no problems installing my OCZ Goliath SE's. Let me try to give some advice to those newbies out there who are tentative about installing heatsinks. First, installing the heatsinks out of the case is going to make life a lot easier on you. Secondly, most capacitors have quite a bit of play in them. I will regularly bend a capacitor out of the way if I think it's going to impact my ability to install a heatsink. Third, don't be afraid of it. If you go into the thing thinking you're going to break something... you probably will.

Moving along with the GA-7DPXDW+, we see that Gigabyte has decided to stagger the 64-bit/66MHz PCI slots. Some might complain about it, but I think it's a good idea as it adds a little flexibility (I'd still rather see them at the bottom like on the Thunder i860, though...). Also notice that the line extending behind the second 64-bit/66MHz PCI slot will slide right in between the the middle two IDE connections on the board. It's a minor detail, but it could save someone a headache if they're throwing in a full-length PCI device and utilizing the IDE connections simultaneously.

Everything else looks pretty good. The positioning of the ATX power connector is exactly where it should be, in the upper left quadrant of the motherboard. Good job there, Gigabyte. I'd have to say the placement of the floppy connector isn't optimal, but with some masterful cable routing it isn't that much of a bother.

The BIOS

Another favorite of mine. I think Hooz considers me somewhat of a Nazi about including information about motherboard BIOSs, but I do feel as it's relatively important. Especially as some manufacturers will advertise "overclocking abilities" on the boxes of their boards or in online documentation but when the hopeful geek gets the board home and POSTs it for the first time he finds out much to his chagrin that "overclocking abilities" meant the ability to change his FSB and not his multiplier or vcore. Marketing at its best. Let's take a quick peak into the BIOS on the GA-7DPXDW+:

My apologies for the fuzzy shots. My camera takes amazing shots outside, but inside close-ups aren't its strong suit. Taking a quick run around the BIOS, we see a couple of interesting things. In the "advanced" section we see a toggle for the integrated Promise RAID controller to switch back and forth between RAID and ATA functionality. This is pretty neat. If you change it to "ATA", the next time you reboot you'll actually see the different Promise Ultra BIOS as opposed to the Fastrak RAID BIOS.

Wandering over to the chipset section, you'll see that the GA-7DPXDW+ will let you change a whack of memory related settings. This is great for the tweaker at heart who wants to squeeze every ounce of memory bandwidth possible out of their system.

This board certainly isn't what the overclockers of the world are looking for in a dual Athlon MP product. As you can see, the "Frequency/Voltage Control" section allows for FSB adjustments only. If you want to get your overclock on, you'd best look at Iwill's MPX2 or MSI's K7D Master-L.