The Gigabyte 7S749-L displayed very stable and good performance in disk related benchmarks e.g. CCWS and BWS. This is especially important to those who preferred to use the SiS 748 based board for multimedia and content based applications. In terms of 3D applications, the difference is only merely within 1-3% in most benchmarks except in Quake 3 which is an OpenGL application. The performance is slightly lower than the reference board but it could be tuned up further in BIOS.

This board has basic feature set. The North Bridge on board is SiS 748, South Bridge is SIS 963L. This board supports up DDR-400/333/266 Memory of up to 3GB. The sound chip on board is a different from the other boards as it uses the Realtek ALC655 which supports the JACK sensing function. There is also a LAN port for immediate connection to your broadband router.

Overclocking wise, this board has some impressive tweaking options which has great potential. For example, the board has a large FSB range of up to 350MHz FSB. It also comes with Voltage adjustments for DDR, AGP, Vcore but they are all tweakable up to +0.1v of the default which is quite limiting. I hope future BIOS can open that up to include more voltage levels. With +0.1v for DDR and using SPD, I can reach 208MHz easily with the AXP 3200+ CPU. Although it has all the voltage adjustments, there is no multiplier control on board which is quite a pity.

Gigabyte 7S748-L came a bit late and this board has great potential of being one of the better ones as it has all the options available. Overclocking the board to higher FSB is a challenge since the board limits the voltage levels and no multiplier control built in to the board. If you are looking for a rock stable and fast performance board from a renown manufacturer, the 7S748-L could well be a choice. If you want to be a bit more challenging, modding it seems the way to go since there are users who successfully reached 230MHz FSB using the older SIS 746 chipset after doing some vcore, ddr, chipset modification.

Suggested Retail : USD 50-63 (click for more pricing information)

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Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio with jack sensing
• USB 2.0 
• 10/100MBps LAN
• Voltage adjustments Vcore, Vdimm, Vcore

Cons 坏处:

• No IDE RAID
• No SATA
• No Multiplier control

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.