I had really bad problems with this motherboard after 3 replacement boards i finnaly worked out what the problem was
1. the second board i had blew a component right below the DDR sockets it acctully blew black crap up the power supply connector .
after the replacemet of this board i was still having simalar problems
heres a list of the problems i was having
locking up durring xp install and saying that the file wasnt on the cd then when you hit retry it finds the file. (this was due to the transistor blowout)
other things like getting into windows and it would just reboot on load of desktop and would sometimes run a couple of mins in games then the textures would go all diffrent colors mainly white and would just lock solid. ( solid being would have to hit the reset )
anyway after i got the last board back which is rev 1.2
it was still doing simalar things .
so I went and bought another graphics card a TI 4200 and it work GREAT.

also the card i had before that was a Hercules Radeon 8500le
heres my specs
2100XP
Ga-7VAXP
712meg Ram PC 2700
2 80 gig IBM drives
Pioneer DVD 16x 40x
ext CDR Iomega
Gametheater XP
300watt powersupply (bit small i know)

Hope this might help someone out

I did not get the raid driver to load whole loading win xp. From what I understand none of the drivers does. The driver loads fine if you are loading win2k. You can search the net to see if you can find drivers. Also the driver you should be choosing is the one with the MB prefix. Once you load the OS you can install the raid driver.

I believe its better to load the OS on a non raid drive and load everything on the raid especially if you are configuring raid 0.

When I attatch ANYTHING to the SLAVE with the Boot Drive whether on the PROMISE ONBOARD controller or normal IDE channels, Windows WILL NOT boot correctly. It gets all the way to the "WinXP" splash logo startup screen, and stays at it forever. This happens with every configuration whenever there is a SLAVE with the boot drive. Without the slave, all boots fine! I can put a cd drive or hard drive as slave with the boot drive and the prob is the same.

I also have changed and installed Windows on another drive to see if it was possibly the drive just to duplicate the prob! I have also double and triple checked all connections and jumpers on drives!

Is this board defective or the drivers wacked?

My current setup :

OS : Win XP Pro
Mainboard : Gigabyte GA-7VAXP rev 2.1 (using onboard network only) Bios f9
Processor : AMD 1900 XP+
Memory : 512 PC 2100
Power Supply : Antec True Power 550
Video : Asylum Geforce 4 Ti 4200 128 meg
Sound : Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Printer : HP 5550
Scanner Mictotek 4900

I have a total of 8 devices to hook up! 5 HD's and 3 optical drives! I put all optical drives and one slower HD on the main IDE and all my faster 4 HD's on the contoller card!

I believe the board is a piece of (****). To all the so-called techies in the forum that rag on the people having problems, you should consider yourself one of the lucky few that got it to work. I have two gigabyte harddrives. After doing what has been mentioned here a hundred times before(no need to beat a dead horse) I took my graphics card ATI Radeon 8500 and slipped it into my previous version gigabyte MB GA-7VTXH+. I Wrote to gigabyte tech support and am still awaiting an answer as to why I had a driver failure on Windows XP 3D Text "screen saver".Yep the screensaver locked it up. Save your breath about corrupt files and save your insults for someone else. If they don't have a good explanation which I will report when they do(if they do) I would say trash your board if you are a gamer, and next time check the reviews before you buy. Like I should have done. ---3/7/03---

I just bought this motherboard today. I love it so far and the only problem I ran into was that I forgot to change the jumper switch to 133-166 from 100. It seems a bit silly to me that default would be 100 with all the 133's out now. Besides that this is the best board ive ever had. Ethernet works great on it. I love firewire. And the PC2700 DDR RAM I bought is amazing. I was a SDRAM man untill today and I want to punch myself for missing out on this. For all you people that had problems with it. Well luck of the draw I suppose. If every board they made was perfect we'd have no need for the forum.

I have the 7VAXP and it is the most amazing board I ever owned. I have a 2200xp unlocked cpu running at 11.5 x 166 = 1900mhz with samsung 256mb pc2700 ram and two 40 gig maxtors in raid 0. With this setup and Asus Geforce 3 video I get a 9000 in 3dmark 2001se I have got the fsb up to 180 mhz before it started to lock up on me and that is with the same buget samsung pc2700 listed above. I have owned this board for 2 or 3 months now and have yet to see it randomly restart or lock up on me. Maybe it's the setup......... Enermax 350watt power supply, Thermaltake volcano 7+ cpu cooler with arctic silver 3, and 3x80mm case fans. The only glitch that I have with my board is that my cpu temp reads 31 degrees celsius and the case temp reads 32 degress..... that can't be right!

correction.......... it's running at 1909 mhz

Relax Mitch,

The boards works great and all the reviews have been great. I have two of these boards and have had them in and out of cases in various configurations with no problems. I find the drivers in win xp works much better than win2k. 3d works great. Sissoft sandra burn-in ran for over 24 hours, no problems. I don't think luck have anything to do with it. I will be building a machine for a client and this is the mobo I will be using.

I've been posting in forums like crazy to figure this prob out!

When you put any drive as slave on the first channel of the onboard promise controller on a GA-VAXP v 2.1 MOBO, the system will hang at the windows splash startup screen no matter where you put the bootdrive!! So this means you CANNOT utilize all ide channels!

Soooo finally I Call Gigabyte...

..and finally find out I'm not crazy!

To there surprise, they have duplicated the problem with the 1.2 version of the motherboard...

got em all flustered!

Makes me feel good that nothing is wrong with my hardware! I guess I'm the 1st to report this prob! I should get a finders fee! Hopefully its just a driver prob! Wouldnt you think they would test something so elementary like this before they release a board!


They are suppose to be calling me back when they can figure it out!

Problem solved...

It was the driver that was included with to MOBO...

ITS STILL BETA!

Went one step back to an older driver that wasnt beta...and whala...works!

I didnt know it was beta due to the fact it came cundled on the driver install disk!

Had no problems with mine initially. After a month the network interface stopped working. Remounted board removing metal standoff under center of board and now LAN interface works. Musta had a short.

I have 1 256Mb DDR333 stick which works great. Bios says it is running with timings 2.5 - 3 - 3. I bought another stick of Samsung DDR333 and it would boot unless I set timings in the Bios for PC2100. I retruned the Samsung but now I don't know what kinds of DDR333 is likely to work. I didn't think the PNY RAM was anything special. How do I know what else will work? What kind of DDR333 RAM are others using?

I had trouble with choppy video in 3DMark2000 & 3DMark2001. Loaded new ATI and VIA 4and1 drivers. Overall performance seems smoother but choppy video didn't go away until I changed the D3D Wait for vertical synch setting to Disable in the ATI Radeon driver.

Except for not knowing what kind of memory to buy for an upgrade, the board works great.

I have had all the same problems listed here in this forum but were all explainable, most common was a fault in my Icute case where the switch would irregularly stick on and shut down the computer randomly, replaced numerous front pannel switches to correct this problem. Also the suspend to Ram was a fault in the Bios where it would stick on allowing you to use your mouse or keyboard to start the computer, only if it is enabled in the bios. that cleared that issue. mostly I have found it to be a very solid board cheaply priced with great features, anyone having problems with this board will find there will be a simple answer and need to keep chasing it up. I've looked at numerous boards and have found it dosent matter what you buy there will always be complaints, so for those of you who have purchased one of these boards, I think you have made the right choice,
regards
Jace

I have this motherboard rev 1.1 plus the giga-byte 9700 pro and it all runs fine IF you dont try overclocking anything. I espeacially bought the gigabyte 9700 pro because they support overclocking. At first I couldnt overclock the VC or the MB without 3Dmark2001 or certain games crashing. You figure a VC and MB made by the same company would not have any problems at all. But upgrading the BIOS from f4 to f9 solved SOME of these problems. I can now atleast overclock my VC without anything crashing now, but not the MB, and my 3Dmark2001 scores are still the same (ave. 10500). Something's wrong there. Luckly someone I know wants me to build them a computer, so I'm just going to put this MB in there computer so I can atleast get some of my money back. Maybe the VC will do good on other MBs, i hope, but I'm going to invest in a A7N8X Deluxe. I hear nothing but good things about it. But I will never buy another gigabyte product ever again.

Yet again as others complaining about this board, if I only did a "gigabyte sucks GA-7VAXP" search in google before hand I could have saved myself some trouble.

I one, love it, i am running a 3.2 gig processor, 6 gig of ddr400, 2 200gig drives on raid cable, and 2 1 tera drives on ide, with a cdrw, and dvd rw.
and a bios update to support it all. its a beautiful board, agp is a little slow. but i have no problems with the board. the ac97 audio is a wonderful feature on this board, but i needed to add 6 more firewire, and 4 more usb ports.

having probs getting sound with spdif, had it when I first got the board, but after probs, which turned out to be memory I can get no digital sound, I can only get sound with analog jacks, I have tried everything I can think of help please?

hi,

my board is running pretty good, but the on board is nut runing very well. i tried a creative soundblaster 4.1 digital but it works bad too. my ac97 has tha lst interrupt and i can't change it. maybe anyone a solution here ? i had so good expierience with ecs k7vta 3.1 on board sound, so i'm a little bit disappointed. thx for every help

Just disable the onboard sound in BIOS.

Anyone tried the f11 bios update that's now available ?
Haven't flashed the BIOS with that yet - I'm hoping it fixes
the Top Performance option.
If I enable this, I get 5 to 10% better performance, but that's when the system lock-ups occur.

i did that ! I thought that was clear

I have flashed my BIOS last night so far no problems at all, I don't use top performance as it caused me to RMA my 9700 Pro.

All is fine without the top performance though.