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Displaying items by tag: SLI

P8Z77-V_PremiumAsus has a new Z77 motherboard hitting the market soon and we have pictures. The new board which will be called the P8Z77-V Premium will feature some nice additions to the feature set that is already on the packed P8Z77-V Deluxe (which we have in the lab). Some of the more interesting features that will be packed in are listed below (along with all of those pictures we talked about).

Published in News

build01Cooler Master is celebrating 20 years of life (we got to celebrate with them at CES 2012), but it has only been in the last five or so that we have really watched them take off. With the launch of the HAF line and their push into the enthusiast level of hardware (and the CM Storm line) Cooler Master has simply bloomed. Over the years we have tested many products from Cooler Master and still have more to go through. Today we are finally able to show you their newest edition to the HAF line up; the HAF XM. The HAF XM is a mid-tower case that has plenty of room for your three-way SLI or Crossfire plus all of the hard drives you could want. You get all of this for around $130 so let’s take a look and see if the HAF XM is worth the price of admission.

Published in Enthusiast Peripherals
Monday, 23 April 2012 13:00

Intel DZ77GA-70K Desktop Motherboard Review

introAlthough the Intel Z77 Express chipset has been available for a while now we chose to wait until the official launch of Ivy Bridge to begin our reviews. After all the Z77 with Panther Point was designed to get the best performance when tied with Ivy Bridge so why not show that off first. To kick off our coverage of the Z77 we deiced to try out Intel’s reference design in the DZ77GA-70K. This performance desktop board from Intel is a great starting point and will give us the feel of how Intel meant things to work. So let’s get to it shall we?

Published in Consumer Motherboards

IntroEVGA has built a name for itself inside the community of overclockers, gamers and other enthusiasts. Although they do not have the same volume as Gigabyte or Asus, they still put out some of the top boards when it comes to overclocking and performance. In fact as of this writing an EVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard holds the number one slot in Futuremark’ s 3DMark 11 Hall of Fame. Unfortunately we do not have a Classified SR-2 in the shop for testing, but we do have an EVGA X79 FTW (151-SE-E777). This board features a matte black PCB, five PCI3 x16 slots and a lot more. So let’s take a look over the X79 FTW and check out both the design choices and features you can expect when you buy this board.

board03With the apparent delay of Intel Ivy Bridge and of course the Z77 chipset that goes with it) we there is going to be a continued demand for the X79 chipset and the pretty much every flavor of the LGA2011 CPU. To be honest I think that even after Ivy Bridge there will be a demand as the replacement for the LGA 2011 CPUs will not hit the market until around Q4 2012 or even later. So with that in mind we are taking a look at what at first glance appears to be a low cost X79 motherboard from Gigabyte. However, once you take a look at it you just might begin to see the serious overclocking and GPU benchmarking potential that it has. Let’s take a look at the Quad-SLI/Crossfire capable X79-UD3 from Gigabyte.

Tuesday, 29 November 2011 06:44

AMD launches its own line of Memory

AMD_Radeon_Memory_Hero_774WThe Internet is all a buzz with the news that AMD is now releasing memory that has the AMD brand  on it (it is rumored that Patriot is actually making the RAM). Many seem to be surprised by this new product release, although we are not exactly sure why. When we first saw the press release on this it really did not seem like news at all. AMD branding memory is nothing new and is something we have seen them do in response to other companies RAM certifications in the past.

Published in News
Saturday, 06 August 2011 22:16

Gigabyte's 990FXA-UD5 performs for us in the Lab

06We have taken our walk around of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 and found we like the design and many of the features packed into the system. In the second half of our test we will be diving into what you can get out of it when you put in under the stress of rendering, gaming and general purpose computing. We do have concerns with this new product as it has really been built with a newer CPU in mind (one that is not ready as of this writing). Still one of the things that AMD has always worked on is backwards compatibility. With that in mind we are breaking out our Phenom II 1100T and getting ready for some testing.

Friday, 29 July 2011 23:04

MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 Performance Review

Board03Ok, we have taken a look at the MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 and its design, and features. We uncovered a few things that gave us some concern. Will the board be able to handle being loaded up with cards or other devices? How will the relatively small number of PCIe lanes behave if we give them too much to think about at once? Well we are going to find that out as well as see how far we can push this board and our Core i7 2600k CPU. Let’s pick up where we left off and dive into the BIOS before we move onto the performance numbers.

01The term Big Bang is used by many scientists to describe the moment of creation. They say that before this event the universe was a chaotic mass of gasses and unformed matter. The gravity and heat combined to compress this to a critical mass. At that critical point all of that gas and unformed matter exploded in all directions to form the basis or the universe we know. MSI’s Big Bang is a culmination of ideas, components and design choices that have, well not really exploded but, hit the market in a fairly big way. Before the launch of this line up MSI was having a rough time in the market. However, even then we saw the hints of big things on the horizon. MSI had partnered up with Lucid; they had begun tinkering with new components for their motherboards and their video cards. We have seen what they can do with the X58, P55 and even the 8xx chipsets from AMD. Now let’s take a look at what they do with the P67 chipset in their Big Bang Marshal.

Thursday, 30 June 2011 00:07

Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 Scene I

 

06

The Z68 has been touted as “cougar point done right” and many other things. I have been asked if the Z68 is going to replace the X58 and many other things beside that ever since it came onto the scene. We have taken a theoretical and design look at one Z68 and now we are going to take a look at another. This one is from Gigabyte; the Z68X-UD3H-B3 (we are getting back to the long names again). This board has a more than its share of selling points. It features the new TouchBIOS (also called Hybrid EFI), the usual compliment USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and of course SLI and crossfire. But there is more to the Z68X-UD3H than just this. We also see that it comes complete with the new VirtuGPU technology from Lucid Driver MOSFETs, and much more. So let’s see what we can find digging into the design and features before we get to the performance numbers in part II.

Published in Consumer Motherboards
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