Manufacturer Gigabyte
Retail Price $130 

Expansion Slot : 5/2/1 
Extra's : Dual BIOS

Here’s a company that hasn’t exactly been in the limelight for some time now. As you know, Gigabyte made quite a reputation for themselves with the GA-6BXE some time ago. Now they’re back, like most everyone else in this industry, with a new board based on the Intel 440BX chipset; the Gigabyte BX2000. This is another board that stands out a little from the horde thanks to a somewhat strange and questionable feature- a dual BIOS setup. Apart from this, the board is a standard 5 PCI/2 ISA/1 AGP board with 4 DIMM sockets (like I mentioned earlier, probably the ideal combination these days) and a row of DIP switches to set up the CPU. Don’t worry, I’m not about to dismiss the dual BIOS setup in a single sentence. Let’s find out what it’s all about.
 

To begin with, the motherboard is fitted with two Flash ROM chips instead of one. The first chip, the primary BIOS, is what handles the normal boot process and etc. The secondary BIOS only kicks in when the first one fails or if it is removed. But don’t worry, there aren’t any jumpers involved here because the whole process is automated. However, if you do screw up the BIOS while flashing it with a incorrect or incompatible version, this option can save you a lot of hassle.  Just press F1 to get the recovery screen and from there you can upload the secondary BIOS to the primary one. And that’s about it, really.  Not exactly a really necessary feature, unless you have a tendency to keep screwing up your BIOS with incompatible versions, but a useful enough feature, I suppose. Just keep it in perspective.

The board itself is well-built, with all connectors placed on nicely convenient locations. The board also houses a small speaker for beeps and two LEDs (green & red). I’m sure you can guess what those are for judging by their colors (amber, anyone?). Next, we have an iTE 8671 I/O chipset powering the board. 
As for hardware monitoring, the BX2000 provides system temperature monitoring and auto speed down & alarm when the CPU overheats or if the fan fails.  And yes, of course, “STR”, a new BIOS feature Suspend-to-RAM. This option allows the system to store files on RAM instead of the HD during suspend mode.
 

Now for the important stuff.. well, performance-wise the BX2000 is quite worthy of a recommendation because it’s neck to neck with the leaders, the ASUS P2B-F and the Abit BX6 rev 2.0. Unfortunately, even the BX2000 doesn’t allow you to set the voltage manually. I was surprised, however, by the stability of the board, because except for one Win98 lock up at 133MHz, the board was doing quite well with PC-100 CAS-2 with a ¼ PCI divider. Naturally, the board was quite stable with PC-133 RAM, too. The maximum FSB is also 133MHz; it would have been nice to see how the BX2000 performed at higher bus speeds, though. Except for the lack of AGP clock ratios and additional bus speeds, this is a pretty good board for overclocking thanks to its stability.