Displaying items by tag: GIGABYTE

Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU.  I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).

As motherboards get smaller and CPUs run cooler the demand for smaller cases grows. The idea of the small form factor case is nothing new but these days awe find the number of these is growing as well.  The idea is simple; stuff a motherboard (complete with CPU, GPU etc), optical drive and some type of storage into a small area while keeping things cool, pretty easy right? We take a look at one entry from ThermalTake; The Element Q. This is a small form factor case that has a few nice things to offer (like a 200 Watt Power Supply). So let’s take a look that the Element Q and see how it handles a system built around the Intel Core i5 661 CPU.

With all the news about the Z68 and P6x chipsets these days is seems that many people feel the X58 is done. Well that is not the case; many manufacturers still see this as a viable top end platform for Intel and are making some great boards for this market space. The nice thing about this is that they are not just making the high-performance/dollar products but are still working on quality boards for every price level. One of these is the Gigabyte X58-USB3. It is a mid-range board that leaves out SATA 3.0 but still keeps many of the other features you would expect from an X58 board (SLI, Crossfire, etc). Gigabyte has made sure they add in USB 3.0 for you while keeping everything around $180. Let’s take a look and see if it is worth that price.

While working on my latest round of reviews (making a few calls etc.) I stumbled upon the one thing that could hurt the burgeoning slate market. It was not some great epiphany nor is this hard to spot. This biggest issue that slates will have is storage space. Looking around the market at the various offerings (especially the PC/Windows offerings) I found a disturbing trend. Most of the devices have very limited storage space. Even Asus’ vaunted EEE Slate which comes with a maximum of 64GB of storage. Out of all of the tablets/slates on the market today the one with the largest amount of storage appears to be the Gigabyte S1080 with a whopping 320GB 5400 RPM HDD.

Nothing says “Hi I am Back!” like a giveaway. So with that in mind I dove into my phone list and called up a few people to see what I could get for you guys.  The response was not only quick but also pretty good! Gigabyte has been kind enough to offer up an X58A-UD7 Rev 2.0 for me to give away to one lucky North American reader.  To get a shot at this all you need to do it be a fan of the site and on next Friday (February 11 2011) I will pull someone’s name out of the hat and send this great board off to you.

We have extended this to include all of North America

Gigabyte (as we have told you) is working on remaking their image. They want to be known as a company that builds components for the enthusiast. They are, and have been, working very hard to reach this goal. Their Ultra Durable series of boards have received numerous awards and accolades from review sites and from people who have bought these boards.  We have been fortunate enough to review a couple of these and have given you our thoughts on the GA-890FXA-UD7 and are working on a revised impression of the GA-P55A-UD7 as well. For now we are going to move from the big to the small. This is the H55N-UBS3 a Mini-ITX board that features the Intel H55 Express chipset, USB 3.0 and a few Gigabyte special features. Follow along as we dive into this $104.99 board and see if size does not matter.

As you saw with our recent coverage of the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Competition (GOOC) North American Finals Gigabyte is pushing their way back into the fore front of the enthusiast scene.  It was not that long ago when their mindset seemed to be one of just maintaining the status quo and building boards for the average consumer. But something changed their minds and they decided to refocus on the enthusiast and the upper end of the consumer market (the upper-mid-range?)  We began to see Gigabyte (or GB for short) drop things in like 2 ounces of copper into each board. They shifted away from standard capacitors and move to all solid caps. They beefed up their power phases and even added in a hardware/software phase switching capability for better energy efficiency. GB seems to be willing and able to push the envelope of the enthusiast’s needs and even some of their crazed wants with their newest additions to the Ultra Durable line up. They have shown us great promise with their Intel based boards, so how about something from AMD? Not that long ago we took a look at the 890FXA-UD7 with AMD’s flagship CPU the Phenom II X6 1090T just to see if Gigabyte can maintain the same performance levels with AMD as they have shown with Intel’s CPUs.

The Gigabyte Open Overclocking Competition North American Finals for 2010 has come to a close. All the LN2 is gone, the press and contestants have all gotten home by now and the rooms at the Pacific Palms resort are all cleaned up. The top three overclockers for the event were sno.lcn, mikeguava and Ross. All three were awarded prizes but only sno.lcn and mikeguava will be flying out to Taipei for the world championship.

GOOC Round one has jsut finished up; we have seen the fastest scores for WPrime and PiFast. Next up is Max Mem and SuperPi. Things have been a little dicey here with the power dropping out a couple of times. This was quickly resotred and the fun went on.

Here we have our first official unboxing. This is one of those things that can have a dual purpose. On the one hand they let everyone know what we have, and what is going on our test bench in short order. These also allow us to take the time to talk in depth about the bundle, packaging, and features of the products we get in the lab. Our first official unboxing comes in the form of the GIGABYTE H55H-USB3.