Throwback Time: Gigabyte GA-7DXR

For this edition of Throwback Thursday I've decided to go back to a time when Gigabyte motherboards were actually blue.  Believe it or not but before black was the PCB color of choice there was a land rush to brand products based on PCB color.  Gigabyte choose Blue, Soltek was all over the place but really Red, DFI did Red and Black boards and Asus did baby sh1t brown.

The GA-7DXR is an Socket A based motherboard using the AMD 761 chipset and VIA south bridge. It came with AGP Pro and a vareity of onboard jumpers used to configure your CPU speed and voltage. (read: overclocking controls). There were even holes in the motherboard for heatsink mounting.

Socket A overclocking was "the thing" during this time and this motherboard offered exceptional performance and way too many overclocking combos between CPU and Memory speed adjustments.  It used standard DDR memory in what I believe was a single channle configuration.  NVidia would start the dual channel movement on the nForce.

Many of the feaures we find on Gigabyt emotherboard today were present on the GA-7DXR inlcuding dual BIOS, overclocking and a very confusing VRM.  If memory serves this one is a 4-phase design and was long before the VRM land rush of "later".