Whereas the 7ZM was a small, basic board with only the bare necessities, the 7ZX covers all the bases with a 1xAGP/5xPCI/1xISA/1xAMR configuration. Unlike ASUS and ABIT, who have added additional features to their newest platforms in the interest of performance, Gigabyte seems to be aiming for compatibility with the only KT133 motherboard in our lab sporting ISA connectivity.
By default, the 7ZX includes on-board audio even though it is listed as an optional feature. For those who aren't interested in the CT5880 sound chip, the optional ISA slot, or the DualBIOS feature, Gigabyte also offers a 7ZX-1 that should be more aptly targeted towards the performance-seeking enthusiast. With the same functionality as Creative Labs' PCI128 soundcard (including four-speaker support), the majority of users will be perfectly content with on-board audio. For those who'd rather use their Live! or Vortex2, disabling the chip is a simple matter.
Overall, the layout of the 7ZX is very easy to work with. Gigabyte has placed the ATX power connector adjacent to the DIMM slots, keeping the "cable mess" associated with many ASUS motherboards to a minimum. IDE/Floppy connectors are stacked, further eliminating twisted cables and scraped knuckles, and after dealing with several motherboards in the past couple of weeks, the 7ZX is perhaps the "neatest" board I've dealt with.
At the moment it seems as though every Intel platform is capped at a 512MB limit for memory, making the 1.5GB limit of the GA-7ZX quite attractive. If you plan to rise above the 512MB support offered by Intel, make sure and buy quality RAM to avoid any potential problems the VIA chipset may encounter with heavy memory loads.
Stories of dead Durons and Thunderbirds have flooded the hardware scene faster than a male cheetah during mating season. We recently lost our GHz Thunderbird and 700MHz Duron due to excessive CPU swapping and a poorly designed heat sink, and another GHz CPU that seems to have overheated. The moral of the story is to use a heatsink approved by AMD, and once it's in, leave it alone. Fortunately, the 7ZX has more room around the Socket A than any other motherboard in the lab. Affixing the proper heatsink/fan or even peltier combination should be no problem whatsoever.
Despite these excellent qualities, there are a couple of things we would like to see from Gigabyte in future products. Mainly, while many motherboard manufacturers are now adding additional USB connectors to take advantage of the latest chipset support, Gigabyte has neglected to make such an inclusion. As a user of multiple USB devices, two or three extra ports would save a lot of work switching devices behind the computer. Additionally, while most manufacturers have moved to BIOS-based bus modifications, all changes have to be made via DIP switches on the 7ZX.