Items tagged with motherboards
We just heard about the second generation of Intel’s Thunderbolt technology, Thunderbolt 2 (with a new “Falcon Ridge” controller), but already ASUS has jumped in and become the first motherboard manufacturer to be Thunderbolt 2-certified. The ASUS Z87-Deluxe/Quad has two Thunderbolt 2 ports, in addition to HMDI, three PCIe 3.0 slots, 10 SATA 6Gbps ports, 8 USB 3.0 ports (with USB 3.0 Boost), and 8 USB 2.0 ports. It also Dual Intelligent Processors 4 for dynamically tuning performance and cooling, an NFC Express accessory, free WiFi GO! and NFE Remote companion apps, and more. At a time when plenty of motherboards don’t have any Thunderbolt ports at all, this one from ASUS...
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Gigabyte had us out to their L.A. offices to show off their latest line of motherboards packing the Intel Z87 chipset, and as usual, the company has a whole lot of SKUs coming down the pike. Clearly, the most work went into Gigabyte’s OC and gaming lines, but there are plenty of welcome surprises and new features in this launch. Extreme OC Series Of all the new motherboards it has brewing, Gigabyte seems to be particularly excited about the Extreme OC series, and it’s not hard to see why. The orange-and-black color scheme takes a backseat to everything the company packed onto the PCB for overclockers on the flagship OC board, the Z87X-OC Force, and the Z87X-OC. First off, there’s...
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Although there are still details such as specifications and pricing being kept under wraps, ASUS has announced its line of Intel Z87-based motherboards--many of which are sporting the new gold-and-black color scheme. There are a lot of them. The main group of consumer-level boards includes the Z87 Deluxe, Z87 A, Z87 Pro, Z87 Plus, and even a mini ITX board called the Z87I-Deluxe, and there’s a workstation and professional design and content creation mainboard called the Z87 WS. ASUS Z87 WS ASUS has stuck with its Republic of Gamers (ROG) line of motherboards, which maintains the old red-and-black look. The line includes the flagship Maximus VI Extreme, which includes a newly-designed OC...
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There’s gold in them thar motherboards, or so the saying (sort of) goes. ASUS announced that its upcoming line of Intel Z87-based motherboards will sport a decidedly gold color scheme, from the heatsinks to the DIMM slots. The boards will also feature black PCBs and silver accents. For the record, we’re talking nearly the whole line, including ASUS’ TUF, and WS motherboards, so if you prefer the older blue scheme over the new gold one, you're out of luck unless you roll with an ROG board. ASUS Z87 WS ASUS says that the new “gold imbued” heatsinks actually do offer better cooling performance, with a larger surface area for better heat dissipation than its earlier...
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If you have a penchant for x86-based embedded system development, AMD and GizmoSphere have a new tiny board for you to play with. The Gizmo is a 4 x 4-inch development board designed for use in applications as diverse as set-top boxes, industrial control systems, and casino gaming, and it features an AMD G-T40E processor (dual core, 1GHz) with Radeon HD 6250 graphics, and 1GB of DDR3 SDRAM. The Gizmo purports of offer 52 GFLOPS performance while consuming just 10W of power, and it supports operating systems including Android, Linux, RTOSes and Windows. There are plenty of connectors on board, including low- and high-speed PCIe edge connectors, a development and debug header, VGA, Ethernet port,...
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One thing you might run into when shopping value oriented parts is that the manufacturers often cut corners to keep the price tag down. It comes with the territory. Along those lines, the idea behind Gigabyte's new HD motherboard series is to offer budget DIY home theater PC (HTPC) builders a line of inexpensive mobos with HDMI and DVI outputs. "The new Gigabyte HD motherboard series means our customers can get much more bang-per-buck from their value segment motherboards," commented Henry Kao, Vice President of Gigabyte Motherboard Business Unit. "Adding dual digital display ports to this segment really sets Gigabyte apart from the competition, raising the bar for value segment motherboard design."...
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A team of overclockers dubbed “The Killers” broke the record for the fastest overclock of an AMD Trinity APU at the AMD Extreme OC show in Taiwan and also took out the record for AMD’s Vishera platform for good measure. Using a Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 motherboard, the crew cranked an AMD 5800K APU with a stock speed of 3.8GHz all the way up to 7.86GHz. “We are extremely excited with this OC result because the F2A85X-UP4 is the first motherboard from GIGABYTE to use our new Ultra Durable 5 technology,” said Henry Kao, Vice President of the GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit in a press release. “These results solidify GIGABYTE’s position as the go-to platform...
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The answer to the question of which CPU/motherboard combo from Intel delivers the most extreme desktop performance is the Intel Extreme Edition Core i7-3970X (3.5GHz, 4GHz Turbo) CPU and the Extreme Series Intel Desktop Board DX79SR (Stormville), which are now available. The 6-core Ivy Bridge beast of a processor offers up 15MB cache, 4 channels of DDR3 memory, integrated graphics, and of course it supports Hyper-Threading. The chip costs $1,059 in the box. As for the DX79SR motherboard, it features 8 DIMM slots and support for up to 64GB of system memory (DDR3-2400+ OC) as well as three PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots, two PCIe x1 slots, one PCI slot, up to six USB 3.0 and fourteen USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire...
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We’ve seen more than our share of motherboards sporting the Z77 chipset, but today we have a pair of Z77 boards--one each from ASRock and MSI--that are designed specifically for overclocking. Even better, both of these mainboards are actually mid-range offerings, meaning you can enjoy the overclocking features without paying for the highest-end options from the two companies. What better way to put them through the paces than by setting up a good old-fashioned mainboard shootout? Because Z77 was made to be paired up with Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, we slapped a quad-core Intel Core i7-3770K in these two contenders and let the fur fly. But first, let’s take a look at the ASRock...
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We’ve seen more than our share of motherboards sporting the Z77 chipset, but today we have a pair of Z77 boards--one each from ASRock and MSI--that are designed specifically for overclocking. Even better, both of these mainboards are actually mid-range offerings, meaning you can enjoy the overclocking features without paying for the highest-end options from the two companies. What better way to put them through the paces than by setting up a good old-fashioned mainboard shootout? Because Z77 was made to be paired up with Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, we slapped a quad-core Intel Core i7-3770K in these two contenders and let the fur fly. But first, let’s take a look at the ASRock...
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It seems so long ago that EVGA dabbled almost exclusively in videocards, but these days, the company has a fleshed out motherboard product line as well. Adding to the latter, EVGA today rolled out three new high-end motherboards for Intel users -- EVGA Z77 FTW, Z77 Stinger, and Z75 SLI. The Z77 FTW sports 4-way SLI support, dual 8-pin CPU power connectors, a 300 percent increase in gold content in the CPU socket, a right-angled 24-pin power connector, and was designed from the ground up for overclocking, EVGA says. Sitting in the middle is the Z77 Stinger, an enthusiast part for people who prefer to build a high-end rig around the space-saving mini-ITX form factor. It's a small board with big...
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Those who like to tinker with and build computers have a new toy to play with in the cubieboard, a $49 self-described “open arm box” that offers intriguing possibilities as an HTPC build. The cubieboard supports Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), so it can operate as a regular desktop, but it can also run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and turn a TV into an “Android TV”. The nitty gritty details include a 1GB ARM Cortex A8 processor with 512KB of L2 cache on board, a Mali 400 Open GL ES GPU, 1GB of DDR3-480MHz, and 4GB of flash storage. The cubieboard also has 10/100M Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, an MMC slot, SATA, and an IR port. The little fellow can be powered by a USB...
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It appears that Gigabyte didn’t want to wait for the next chipset release to try and make waves with a new motherboard. The company unveiled the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, its new flagship board for extreme overclockers, which it said set the world record for overclocking with an Intel Core i7 CPU at a freakish 7.102GHz The Z77X-UP7 boasts a 32+3+2 power phase design and all-digital PWM along with Ultra Durable 5 components that are designed to take a beating yet remain stable and cool. Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Other notable features of the board include support for up to four-way graphics, a PCI-E x16 3.0 slot that provides a direct link to the CPU, and a host of overclocking features and tools such...
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Over the last few months, we have looked at plenty of Z77 based motherboards here at HH, covering a wide range of price points. But today we dive deep into one of the higher-end models available, the Gigabyte G1.Sniper3. The Gigabyte G1.Sniper3 supports Sandy and Ivy Bridge LGA 1155 processors and features support for up to 32GB of DDR3-2066 (OC) system memory. As a gaming motherboard, Gigabyte saw fit to include support for up to 4-way SLI and CrossFireX (up to PCI-E x8 with four cards and PCI-E x16 with two), Creative Labs audio, and a Killer NIC too... Gigabyte G1.Sniper3 Z77 Motherboard Review...
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Over the last few months, we have looked at plenty of Z77 based motherboards here at HH, covering a wide range of price points. But today we dive deep into one of the higher-end models available, the Gigabyte G1.Sniper3. We slapped an Ivy Bridge chip in this one instead of the Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K and 2700K's we've tested in the boards thus far, to see how well Intel's newest chips and the Z77 work together. Specifically, we used an Intel Core i5-3470 chip, which we reviewed in depth here. The Gigabyte G1.Sniper3 supports LGA 1155 processors and features support for up to 32GB of DDR3-2066 (OC) system memory. As a gaming motherboard, Gigabyte saw fit to include support for...
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We've already covered all of the juicy details of Intel’s Z77 chipset and put a few motherboards through their paces, but there are so many manufacturers with killer boards available based on the chipset, that it’d be a crime if we didn’t round up another stack of them for you. This round of Z77 mainboards consists of entries from ASRock, EVGA, Gigabyte, and Zotac, more specifically the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional, EVGA Z77 FTW, Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H, and Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi... Z77 Motherboard Roundup II: EVGA, ASRock, Gigabyte, Zotac...
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We've already covered all of the juicy details of Intel’s Z77 chipset and put a few motherboards through their paces, but there are so many manufacturers with killer boards available based on the chipset, that it’d be a crime if we didn’t round up another stack of them for you. This round of Z77 mainboards consists of entries from ASRock, EVGA, Gigabyte, and Zotac. To date, the EVGA Z77 FTW and Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi we're going to show you here are the only Z77 boards from their respective companies (though more are surely on the way), while the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional and Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H are high-end offerings, although not quite at the tip top of their respective...
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EVGA’s latest EATX enthusiast board is the Z77 FTW, which is built to let users push its overclocking limits. The board supports Intel 3rd-generation processors and has five PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots and one PCI-E 3.0 x1 slot that taken together can handle up to four-way SLI support with graphics cards at x8-x16-x8-x8. You can slap in up to 32GB of DDR3-2133 (x4 DIMM slots) for serious memory horsepower. Other features include dual Gigabit LAN, four SATA 6Gbps ports, four SATA 3Gbps ports, two eSATA ports, six total USB 3.0 and ten USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, and a mini DisplayPort. One of the new Precision X skins The solid gold capacitors and E-LEET Tuning Utility will certainly help overclockers,...
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There’s a pair of new Intel 7-Series motherboards out from ZOTAC, and they’re both in the mini-ITX form factor. The ZOTAC Z77-ITX WiFi and H77-ITX WiFi support LGA1155 3rd-generation and 2nd-generation Intel chips, and although both are equipped with a PCI-E x16 (3.0) slot, they’re also Intel HD 2500/4000-ready. The boards have a pair of DIMM slots that support up to 16GB of DDR3-1600 (2133MHz OC) RAM, as well as four USB 3.0 and eight USB 2.0 ports, onboard 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0, 8-channel HD audio, and HDMI audio output. The Z77-ITX WiFi sports dual Gigabit Ethernet ports; two SATA 6Gbps ports, two SATA 3Gbps ports, and one mSATA slot; and two HDMI ports and one mini-DisplayPort....
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Sometimes it’s the little things that make your life easier, and that’s what Gigabyte has been aiming for with its On/Off Charge technology. Simply put, On/Off Charge is a utility on Gigabyte motherboards that enables fast charging of iOS devices, even when the system is sleeping or even turned off. With the new third-generation iPad already flooding the brains of early buyers with dopamine, Gigabyte wants you to know that On/Off Charge supports the new device and can charge one up to 40% faster than a standard USB port. On/Off Charge also supports all previous iOS devices, and it’s available on most Gigabyte boards released in the last couple of years, including the company’s...
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Show of hands, how many of you remember the name Chaintech (or Walton Chaintech, if you prefer)? Don't beat yourself up if you've forgotten all about Chaintech, a once popular player in the motherboard and graphics business. The last time we featured a Chaintech product was in 2004, back when we reviewed the company's Apogee AA5700U graphics card. And the last Chaintech brand motherboard we tested was a 9CJS Zenith Series... in 2003. Chaintech officially quit the motherboard and graphics card markets in 2006, but word on the Web is that it's looking to make a comeback. According to DigiTimes, Walton Chaintech has partnered up with a leading graphics card vendor in China called Colorful in order...
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Intel’s X58 chipset made for great platform performance, and even though the chip maker has unleashed many more chipsets since the X58 came out, there hasn’t been a true successor in the high-end of their product line-up (not even the Z68 chipset) until now. The X79 chipset looks to pick up the X58’s poll position, so we decided to bench test a few motherboards from ASRock, ASUS, and Gigabyte to see how Intel's new flagship performs....
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