5 PCI slots, Support for CPU clock multipliers up to 9.5x, full hardware monitoring capabilities, yep the BX2000 certainly lives up to our assertion that the 440BX chipset is just about done in terms of innovation.

But wait, what's this mysterious "DualBIOS" feature on the BX2000's spec sheet?

Ah friends, here's where Gigabyte's engineers listened a little too closely to the Dilbert-esque marketing gurus within the company, and proceeded along a path to nowhereville.

See, the DualBIOS feature on the BX2000 mainboard is exactly that: a dual BIOS system. Gigabyte has literally slapped a 2nd flash BIOS chip onto the BX2000 for use if the first BIOS chip goes bad, or self-destructs, or whatever.

Now excuse us if we can't see the logic here, but frankly we were having a tough time understanding the need for this "technical innovation".

The staff at Sharky Extreme has tested over 75 mainboards during the past two years. We've done everything from overclock them to nearly double their intended speeds, to soldering and removing limiting components on the boards, to applying temperature reducing devices that reach near a negative 50 degrees C. Also, during the course of testing and whatnot, we've also downloaded or flashed various mainbord BIOSes hundreds of times over that period, at least twice a week on average.

The point of this diatribe is that never once, not one time, have we fried or wiped a mainboard's BIOS by accident.

Now call us talented or lucky (most likely not in that order) or whatever you want to call us, but don't tell us we need two BIOS chips on our plain jane regular system boards because we'll tell you that we don't.

Do we need an additional PCI slot on our mainboards in case our Editor in Chief comes home late from a rave and tries molesting one of the test machines with a Voodoo3 PCI card?

No.

Do we need an additional Slot-1 connector for the times when we literally shoe-horn in the required CPU needed for a test rig even when the mounting brackets are not compatible with the CPU?

No.