Displaying items by tag: Z87

In other news about Intel we are now hearing that Devil’s Canyon, Intel’s Haswell refresh, will come clocked at 4GHz stock with turbo speeds of up to 4.4GHz. This stock speed is unheard of from Intel who has stayed away from pushing the stock speeds of their enthusiast CPUs. This step up is certainly going to be welcomed by the enthusiast and overclocking community who have been salivating over the new Z97 chipset and the feature packed motherboards that have been trickling out.

The new MSI motherboard labeled Z87 MPower MAX, based on the Z87 chipset comes with a support for Intel Core, Pentium and Celeron processors of the fourth generation in LGA1150 package.

In part one of our review of the Gigabyte Z87-UD3H we looked at the design, features and layout of the board. Now in part two we are going to see if those choices were good or bad. Gigabyte has a fairly good history of designing boards that have great performance, but as have also seen boards that fall apart as soon as you push them (overclocking). So far it looks like the Z87X-UD3H has the right components and design to maintain performance for both stock use and also for overclocking. Let’s put that theory to the test shall we?

Gigabyte decided to fulfil increasing demands for higher data transfer speed and today announed official certification of Dual Port Thunderbolt 2 technology which will be implemented in their GIGABYTE Z87X-UD7 TH model motherboard. This technology will allow speeds of up to 20 Gb/s which is 4 times as much as USB 3.0 is offering and twice as much as the regular Thunderbolt. The new controller is codenamed "Falcon Ridge" and allows simultaneous data transfer across two channels per port.

Gigabyte is not a company to be left out of any market and they are certainly keeping pace in the motherboard arena. They are one of the companies that not only leads sales, but also helps to drive innovation and performance standards. We have had many Gigabyte motherboards in the lab and almost without exception they have been great performers. Gigabyte has also been able to learn from their mistakes and from feedback, whether it is from consumers or the press. So where does this leave Gigabyte in the Z87 market? Well we happen to have a Z87X-UD3H in the lab, so let’s take a look and see.

With the launch of Intel’s Haswell there was the normal shift to a new chipset. This is Intel’s Z87 chipset and everyone rushed to get their version of this new chipset out onto the market. Many of the boards that reached consumers were just rehashes of boards that were already on the market with the Z77 chipset, but with the bonus of improved performance under Haswell. So with that in mind we have Asus’ Z87-Expert up on the test bench to see just how it stacks up to the older Z77 boards running Ivy Bridge. Let’s dive in.

With the official launch of the new Intel processors the introduction of new motherboards also started. Gigabyte offer is as usual huge and consists of as many as 25 different boards.