Gigabyte GA-6RX Apollo Pro266 ATX

AnandTech Motherboard Rating

Performance

The GA-6RX performed decently in our tests. 

Price

At around $190, the GA-6RX is a little bit too expensive for Socket-370 CPUs, while alternative i815E motherboards deliver almost the same performance figures with regular SDRAM at around $140.

Stability

The board crashed only once in 24 hours, which is a much lower rate than the average 5 to 6 crashes in 24 hours. 

Quality

The quality of the GA-6RX is above average, better than some of the boards we have seen. However it's still not the best we've seen.

Features

Being one of the first to provide DDR for Socket-370 CPUs is no doubt the best feature of the board; whether it's a useful feature or not is another question though.  The addition of the overclocking features and the IDE RAID controller is also a plus. 

The only complaint, if any, would be the somewhat unattractive expansion slot configuration, which is just average.

Layout

The general layout of the board is very good, with the exception of the placement of the CPU socket as well as the two IDE connectors supported by the Promise IDE RAID controller.

Availability

Gigabyte products are generally easy to find online, but compared to some other brands, they are not as widely available in local computer stores.

Documentation & Software Bundle

The manual is reasonably well written.  Detailed information is given on all the motherboard settings and instructions on sound device setup.  BIOS settings and RAID setup are discussed detailed in the manual as well.  The only complaint here would be the lack of chipset driver setup instructions.