2001 was a strange trading year. Usually there is a definite pattern, and a logical-seeming mix of products in demand, but the last few months of 2001 were bizarre. Southern winter is the traditional quiet time of year; trade slows down from its frantic summer pace in May or perhaps as late as July, and gradually dies away over the next few months till it almost stops in October and November, while people save their pennies up in anticipation of Christmas. Then it goes berserk for a few short weeks, followed by the new year break, then the steady strong trade of the summer and autumn months takes over once again.

But 2001 was different: it followed more or less the usual pattern, perhaps a little quieter than usual, until the events of September 11th, which immediately impacted on people's buying habits. The sudden change in business and consumer spending was utterly without sense or reason, of course, but no retailer could have missed noting how dramatic the psychological effect of this isolated one-time event a half a world away was. Interestingly though, the overall pattern was complex. People wanting modest, sensible systems stayed away in droves, or lowered their sights and asked for second-hand parts to keep the cost down. But people with a yen for high-performance seemed to be completely unaffected. The net result was that instead of our usual mix of about 10 percent exotic gaming rigs and then about 30 percent each of solid, middle of the road stuff; entry-level new systems; and ultra-budget second-hand units, we had both extremes and no middle. In a typical November we have trade-in stock building up and overflowing, for it doesn't start to sell until the back-to-school market kicks in from January till May or so. But in 2001 we ran clean out of decent second-hand parts; the demand was overwhelming. The gamers and people wanting a touch of luxury, on the other hand, kept right on spending. Instead of our usual Durons and mid-range Athlons, we built Thunderbird 1400s and Athlon XP 1700s with all the trimmings, and we sold right out of used parts.

Once again, many of our favourite boards carried over into the new year, notably the Epox 8HKA+ KT-266A and the Soltek SL-75KAV, but also a couple of golden oldies that remained useful as solid, unadventurous boards suitable for trouble-free entry-level systems: the FIC AZ-11 and even the elderly old SD-11.

Gigabyte 7ZMM illustration

Gigabyte 7ZMM

And this, finally, leads me to the Gigabyte 7ZMM. We usually sell a small proportion of integrated boards, perhaps 10 percent or so, sometimes double that. But in Q4 2001 we can't have sold more than a couple of dozen Durons all up, and none of them on an integrated board. And this is why this mid-2001 vintage motherboard is here on the 2002 page: we didn't sell any during the previous year!

They are actually quite a nice board, if you like integrated things (which we usually don't). They are very small and rather cramped but they squeeze in all essentials, a single serial port, the usual USB and parallel, and even that vital rarity on integrated boards, an AGP slot. That last is the key issue in choosing an integrated board: without a proper stand-alone AGP slot, the board can never be upgraded. That is not too bad for business systems but for home users it is crazy.

  • CPU support: Duron
  • Speed: 200MHz.
  • Slots: 3 PCI, AGP, 2 USB, serial, integrated sound and video.
  • RAM: 2 168-pin SDRAM, up to 1GB.
  • IDE: 2 ATA-100.
  • Chipset: VIA KM133, AMI BIOS.
  • Best With: Duron.
  • Status: Legacy.
Elite K7S5A illustration

ECS K7S5A

The SiS 735 chipset was a particularly interesting one. It was first previewed in mid-2001 when the DDR main board market was in the doldrums. The ALI entrant was considered a non-starter, the VIA KT-266 buggy and very late, the well-performed and stable AMD 760 was dear and in short supply, and VIA's SDRAM-only KT-133A was taking all before it. Nvidia's much-touted Nforce was still vapourware. Unless you just didn't care about the cost, a KT-133A was the only rational choice.

Then, from out of nowhere, came the SiS 735: an entrant from a firm that had all but foundered in its sudden rush to build its own fab facilities and cut ties with its former manufacturing partners, a firm that had little left but a reputation, and that a poor one. To everyone's astonishment, the SiS 735 was the clear benchmark leader, and in most respects it still was right up until the transition to 166MHz FSB chipsets began: if we are to disregard the weird all-in-one Nforce, only VIA's second-effort KT266A could beat it. SiS had three hurdles to overcome: the first was demonstrating competitive performance. This they had already done. The second was demonstrating stability and compatibility: this too was within their measure. And the third was getting mainboard makers to adopt it. This was perhaps the hardest task, as mainboard makers are reluctant enough to offend Intel by making VIA and Athlon products, offending both Intel and VIA at the same time requires more than the usual bravery. SiS chose to overcome that reluctance by making the 735 an offer just too good to refuse. It was very cheap. For a high-tech state-of-the-art DDR chipset, it was amazingly cheap.

Elite are surprisingly little-known for a company that is one of the largest mainboard manufacturers of all. Elite is bigger than ever since its merger with the infamous PC Chips group (the fake cache people) in the late 1990s. Elite made quite a splash on the overseas markets with this board, one of the very few to use the SiS 735 chipset, and once they overcame a well-publicised BIOS problem, were very successful with it. Here at Red Hill we had been very happy with our KT266A mainboards and had no need to switch, but with the Elite coming in anything up to fifty dollars cheaper than a KT266A, it would be foolish not to try one.

In the flesh, the boards had that familiar PC Chips look about then: they were alarmingly thin and very cheaply made. Our first impression was that there was no way these could be as reliable as our Epox and Soltek KT266As (or our Soltek KT133As, for that matter, for these were a dual mode board that could take SDRAM or DDR), and our past experience with PC Chips associated companies did little to encourage us. Still, we gave a pair of them every chance to show their stuff. We soon found that they were fussy about RAM and incompatible with the Athlon Thunderbird CPU family. Not a great start.

From there it got a good deal worse: the more we tinkered with them in the workshop the more apparent it became that they were unstable. Quite often they wouldn't even run error-free for long enough to complete a Windows installation. We tried every possible combination of power supply, CPU and RAM: some combinations worked better than others, but none was reliable enough to be salable. Eventually we decided our two samples must be faulty and sent them back for warranty replacement.

The response from ECS was in the worst traditions of their PC Chips heritage. After a long, long wait, they were returned to us completely unaltered. According to ECS, this is how they are supposed to be!

We had already discovered that using SDRAM in them gave particularly poor results, and that some of the less unstable configurations were not too bad so long as you didn't ask the system to do anything difficult (i.e., you could run email and spreadsheets so long as you didn't try to run CAD or games). So in the end we underclocked the K7S5As back to 100MHz FSB, fitted the best DDR we could lay our hands on and the smallest, least demanding CPUs we could find (Duron 850s.) Provided we were very careful with video card choice, we could get a system that ran light-duty office applications with decent stability. One of our two ECS K7S5As went out into service and finally remained trouble-free — but only because it only ever got used it for word processing and email. We sold the other one to an optimist in the trade for less than half price, on the understanding that there was absolutely no warranty on it.

In summary: the worst main boards we have seen in quite a while.

  • CPU support: Duron, Athlon XP (not Thunderbird).
  • Speed: 200 or 266MHz.
  • Slots: 5 PCI, AGP, 2 USB, 2 serial, integrated sound.
  • RAM: 2 DDR RAM, 2 SDRAM, up to 1GB.
  • IDE: 2 ATA-100.
  • Chipset: SiS 735, AMI BIOS.
  • Best With: Best avoided.
  • Status: Legacy.
Soltek SL-75DRV4

Soltek SL-75DRV4

Unless we missed something, the only differences between this board and the previous Soltek were the sexy new colour and the ATA-133 support. ATA-133 was a Maxtor initiative that was greeted with an almost complete lack of interest by the rest of the industry, and quite rightly so. In a world where hard drive transfer rates were still little better than the old ATA-33 standard, and well inside the ATA-66 limit, there was no present need for the 100MB/sec offered by ATA-100, let alone ATA-133. Only one good reason can be advanced for ATA-133: it came in at the same time as a change to allow a single IDE drive to exceed 128GB. But with the average hard drive capacity hovering around 40GB in early 2002, the requirement for 160GB IDE drives was all but non-existent, and with the all-new Serial ATA interface expected to arrive reasonably soon, all the other majors ignored ATA-133: Seagate, IBM, Samsung and Western Digital went direct from ATA-100 to SATA. Still, it did no harm, so there was no reason not to have a mainboard in the nice new colour.

  • CPU support: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP
  • Speed: 200 or 266MHz.
  • Slots: 5 PCI, AGP Pro, 4 USB, 2 serial, integrated sound.
  • RAM: 3 168-pin PC-2100 DDR RAM, up to 1.5GB.
  • IDE: 2 ATA-133.
  • Chipset: VIA KT266A, Award BIOS.
  • Best With: Athlon XP.
  • Status: Legacy.

Gigabyte 7VTXE+

Another board we came rather late to, something we often do with Gigabyte products as they seem to price them rather high (as compared with directly competing boards from, say, Soltek or Epox) when they first come out, and then drop the price significantly a little later on in the product's life. The 7VTXE+ was essentially the same as the previous 7VTXE except for the revised south bridge chip.

  • CPU support: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP
  • Speed: 200 or 266MHz.
  • Slots: 5 PCI, AGP Pro, 4 USB, 2 serial, integrated sound.
  • RAM: 3 168-pin PC-2100 DDR RAM, up to 1.5GB.
  • IDE: 2 ATA-133.
  • Chipset: VIA KT266A, Award BIOS.
  • Best With: Athlon XP.
  • Status: Legacy.