One of the latest boards to come from Gigabyte is the feature rich 7VRXP, based around the VIA KT333 chipset. The board comes with Dual BIOS, USB2.0, RAID and integrated LAN. The Dual BIOS set up is a useful feature; if the original one gets attacked by a virus or damaged by careless flashing (we've all done it), your system will still boot up as the board automatically switches to the second BIOS chip. This could potentially save you a lot of time and hassle.

A colourful beastie is the 7VRXP, since the PCB is blue, the IDE connectors are green and white, the RAID connectors are green and even the USB headers are colour coded; orange for USB2.0, black for USB1.1. As well as looking pretty (how sad?), this also makes life easier when connecting peripherals and components.

The 7VRXP supports four channels of ATA/133 via the normal connectors and usefully the RAID, which is also ATA/133, is controlled by a Promise PDC2076 chip. This can be switched from RAID to normal IDE at the flip of a Dip switch.

A nicely laid out board, the 7VRXP has some neat design touches - all the IDE and floppy connectors, including the RAID, are placed along one edge of the board, allowing for tidy cable runs. Joining these are the ATX power connector, one USB1.1 header and the headers for Smart Card, Compact Flash/Smart Media readers, although no actual readers are included in the package.

The Gigabyte 7VRXP is a stable board that performs well and has a useful fail-safe BIOS, with the added attraction of being able to switch the RAID controller to normal IDE mode.