VR World » Gigabyte

Gigabyte Overtakes Asus To Become Largest Motherboard Vendor In Q1 2015

Harish Jonnalagadda — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:53:29 +0000

Asus (TPE:2357) and Gigabyte (TPE:2376) have been duking it out for the last two years in the motherboard segment, with the latter vendor taking the lead in Q1 2015.

Gigabyte is said to have sold 4.7 to 4.8 million motherboards in Q1 2015, with Asus netting 4.5 million sales. Both vendors accounted for over 80% of all motherboard sales in China. MSI and ASRock (TPE:3515) are set to have far fewer sales in this category, with 2.3 to 3.2 million sales projected for the first half for both organizations.

In what may be a sign of things to come in 2015, DigiTimes (which has a reliable track record for this, unlike its rumors) revealed that overall motherboard shipments would be far lesser than last year, with both Asus and Gigabyte not expected to cross 20 million unit sales in 2015. The PC segment witnessed a decline in markets like China, where mobiles and tablets continue to be on the rise. The Euro’s depreciation led to lukewarm sales in Europe.

To counter slowing sales, ASRock is said to target the server segment, as evidenced by the vendor’s launch of a Skylake board earlier this year. Meanwhile, MSI will be shifting its efforts toward the gaming notebook segment after barely breaking even in 2014.

One reason for slow sales this year could be attributed to the fact that there isn’t a Broadwell CPU for the desktop yet, and with Intel set to launch Skylake later this year, it is likely customers are just waiting for the next-generation CPU to arrive before upgrading their hardware. Broadwell is estimated to launch in June, and Skylake is rumored to make its debut in October, with the CPU featuring the LGA1151 socket. The architecture will accommodate both DDR3 and DDR4 memory modules, and is said to usher in a host of changes with relation to energy utilization.

We should be seeing Z170/H170-based boards by vendors in time for the launch of Skylake, which will possibly lead to an increase in sales in the final quarter of 2015.

The post Gigabyte Overtakes Asus To Become Largest Motherboard Vendor In Q1 2015 appeared first on VR World.

A Peek Inside Gigabyte’s Suite at CES 2015

VR World Staff — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 03:44:13 +0000

We stopped by Gigabyte’s (TPE: 2376) suite at CES 2015 and got the low down on its latest and greatest products.

The company had a lot of nice systems featuring its products that were built by companies like Digital Storm, Origin, Cyberpower PC, and Cybertron PC. There were many of its current offerings on display as well as some of the new ones like the company’s newest addition to the Brix lineup, the Brix S Broadwell. The Brix S Broadwell features Broadwell CPUs that make the unit extremely power efficient. The brand new X99 SOC Champion features an OC socket for the CPU that allows the board to really push the NB/cache/uncore frequencies, thus delivering blistering memory and system performance. The Asus Rampage V Extreme sure better watch out since this board is also a cache/uncore/NB overclocking beast, and it only costs $300.

We will be following up with more insight into some of the products that Gigabyte had to show at CES 2015 in the coming days. We will also have some pictures of the Extreme Overclocking event that it held as well.

Brix s Broadwell and the X99 SOC Champion

The Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5

The Gigabyte Brix lineup

An absolutely stunning custom build featuring an Enermax chassis and Gigabyte parts

14″ P34W Notebook

The post A Peek Inside Gigabyte’s Suite at CES 2015 appeared first on VR World.

CES 2015: Seagate Launches The New Seven Portable Hard Drive

VR World Staff — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 08:32:00 +0000

Seagate Technology PLC (NASDAQ:STX) today announced the launch of a new ultra-slim external hard drive that holds 500GB of data while only being 7mm thick. The steel drive will be available in mid to late January at a MSRP of $99.99, and pre-orders can be made now at Seagate.com and Amazon.com.

The portable hard drive looks like a stylized 2.5” notebook hard drive with a smooth finished steel case. The Seagate Seven’s case is made entirely of steel to give it structural integrity while allowing it to be as thin as possible, with the added bonus of looking pretty stunning as well. The 500GB capacity is held in the drive that is an amazing 7mm thick, really showing just how far hard drive technology has come these last few years. The industrial design of the drive is very nice and evokes a lot of memories of bare hard drives that Seagate has been producing for years, 35 years in fact. The drive will make for a nice addition to users who want to back up their files and take the data with them in a small package. Notebook users will appreciate that they can store more data with the added plus of the drive barely adding any weight to the notebook bag. The drive features a low profile motor technology that includes extreme gyro handling capabilities ensuring that the drive operates safely in a variety of environmental factors.

The MSRP of the Seagate Seven is $99.99 for the 500GB drive, equating to just 20 cents per Gigabyte of Storage. The drive will be widely available in mid to late January. The Seagate Seven though can already be pre-ordered for those who want to get their orders secured. The preorders can be made at Seagate.com and Amazon.com.

The post CES 2015: Seagate Launches The New Seven Portable Hard Drive appeared first on VR World.

PC Enthusiats: What Can We Expect to See at CES 2015?

VR World Staff — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:08:07 +0000

With the annual Consumer Electronics Show right around the corner and the industry’s marketing efforts going into overdrive, what is it that we will likely see next week?

It’s a safe bet that if will be a week of opposites.

From hardware going to both larger and smaller designs, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) G-Sync versus AMD (NYSE: AMD) FreeSync, small displays with massive resolution, and gaming notebooks of both massive and diminutive sizes.

Small form factor hardware as is one of the fastest growing areas in the hardware segment, and no doubt there will be a lot of it on display at CES. With hardware becoming so powerful and small we are seeing a lot of really powerful builds that can be done. With even MATX X99 boards we are seeing that there is a move toward making things small and potent. On the other side there is a lot of huge pieces of hardware showing up on the market, namely 4K and ultra wide monitors. They are becoming even more prolific and the ultra wide monitors are drawing a lot of interest from gamers and power users who were once planning on going for a 4K monitor or two. There will be a lot of talk this CES about AMD’s FreeSync for enthusiast gaming monitors as it is the newcomer challenging Nvidia’s established G-Sync. FreeSync will draw the attention of monitor manufacturers since it is less costly to implement and license than the G-Sync solution. The LG 34UM67 will be a curved ultra wide monitor that will feature AMD’s FreeSync, and should definitely steal a lot of the spotlight next week.

The mobile computing segment is also something to watch next week as we will see a lot of small notebooks with very high resolution displays. It is easy to say that there will be a number of notebook models that will feature 3K and 4K screens, even at the 15.6-inch sizes. There will also be a movement with ultraportable gaming notebooks of small size that can be docked with a desktop graphics card for superior gaming ability while at a desk. With the shrinking of parts that make up computers we will be seeing a drastic reduction in size and weight of these ulta portable notebooks. Not only will they be smaller but they will be potent and even come equipped with quad-core Intel i7 processors and decent graphics. On the other hand you will also see that there is a move to the opposite extreme as there will be new 18″ gaming notebooks that will be the true embodiment of the “desktop replacement” name. Some of these huge notebooks will even sport gaming grade mechanical keyboards featuring Cherry MX Brown switches.

Be sure to check back throughout next week as CES 2015 kicks off in Las Vegas.

The post PC Enthusiats: What Can We Expect to See at CES 2015? appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Introduces Force H1 Gaming Headphones

Jimmy Chuang — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 08:26:47 +0000

Gigabyte (TPE: 2376) offered online gamers a new toy on Dec. 1 as it introduced the Force H1 wireless gaming headphones, which was designed for mobile gaming and entertainment.

With Bluetooth 3.0 technology, Force H1 provides hassle-free, wireless mobility for gaming enthusiasts who long for experiencing high-fidelity sound quality while playing their favorite games.

Today’s mobile gamers acquired much enhanced audio performances for their headsets, now that the mobile game content is rapidly getting more sophisticated, Gigabyte said. The Force H1 is specifically tuned to offer a comprehensive mobile gaming experience and delivering the optimized multi-dimensional comfort in sound, wear and control for mobile gamers.

The new headphones’ on-ear design padded with ultra-soft ear cushions would block all outside noise, while the built-in 40mm gold-plated driver creates rich and clear all-around stereo quality, allowing gamers to get immersed in their favorite games anytime and anywhere, Gigabyte said.

The new headphones’ lightweight design with the unique hexagonal structure evenly distributes contact pressure to ensure wearing comfort, especially for long gaming or jam sessions. The swiveling ear pad with memory foam wrapped in breathable leather offers superior ergonomic fit to add extra comfort, while the stainless steel reinforcement provides both durability and flexibility for the optimized fit.

Gigabyte said that the new headset is also good for listening to music, watching videos or movies or communicating on mobile devices. The integrated volume, call answering and playlist controls on the ear cup bring users with easy and intuitive control navigated by touch. Meanwhile, its battery is good for 10-hour of uninterrupted wireless playtime and up to 300 hours in standby with micro USB charging on the side.

Force H1 can be folded and stored in the supplied durable case, which was also designed for commuting or long-distance travels, Gigabyte said.

The post Gigabyte Introduces Force H1 Gaming Headphones appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia Launches Tesla K80 Dual Kepler Compute Card

Anshel Sag — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 13:50:44 +0000

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has launched its latest Tesla CUDA compute card, the Tesla K80 today at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans.

This follows Nvidia’s announcement last week that it had been awarded a $325 million Department of Energy grant with IBM to help build two 100 Petaflops+ machines for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Those supercomputers are expected to be built in 2017 and will use Nvidia’s yet-t0-be-built Volta GPU which comes after Pascal which comes after Maxwell, which is what Nvidia is currently using in their consumer graphics cards, but hasn’t quite started to use in professional just yet. So, until then, people looking for the fastest compute cards are going to want to look at Nvidia’s new Tesla K80.

Nvidia’s new Tesla K80 dual GPU compute card is an interesting product because it once again brings back Nvidia’s dual GPU Tesla products and increases the amount of compute you can squeeze onto a single card. Logically, you would think that the K80 would naturally be two K40’s smacked together into a single card, but that’s not accurate. In order to build the K80, Nvidia actually went with GPUs with similar shader core counts as the Tesla K20, but what’s most important is that they actually did double the onboard memory of the K80 from the K40 to 24 GB of GDDR5. Whenever we talk to anyone looking to do large simulations or scenes, their number one complaint is that they can never have too much VRAM and Nvidia appears to be listening to them by packing a whopping 24 GB of GDDR5 per card or 12GB of GDDR5 per GPU.

According to Nvidia’s specifications for the Tesla K80, it has 4992 shader cores (double that of the K20) which turns out to slightly less than double that of the K40, this is because Nvidia is using two GK-210 GPUs rather than the K40’s GK-110B. However, if you look at Nvidia’s performance claims, they state that the Tesla K80 is capable of 8.74 teraflops single-precision and 2.91 teraflops double-precision. This is more than double that of the K40 GPU which it seeks to replace and almost double that of the K10, Nvidia’s first dual GPU Tesla card. That’s the fantastic thing about Nvidia’s own Tesla cards, the K80 is a Kepler based dual GPU card while the K10 is also a Kepler based dual GPU card and the performance difference is nearly double simply by going from the GK-104 GPU design to the GK-110 (full-blown) Kepler GPU design. The Tesla’s K80 two GK210 GPUs each have 13 SMs that are clocked at 562 Mhz base, 875 Mhz boost thanks to Nvidia’s new GPU boosting features for this Tesla card, a Tesla first and something that came over from the consumer cards. Either way, its a great achievement and this is Nvidia’s next step before introducing a Maxwell-based Tesla compute card.

Nvidia’s Tesla K80 Compute Card – Note, no display out since this is a compute card

Also, if you look at the double-precision performance, it is more than 30 times faster than the original dual Kepler GPU card, the K10 and more than twice as fast as the K40 which means that Nvidia makes up for the lack of shader cores somewhere else. One of those places is in the card’s memory bandwidth which is pumped up to a whopping 480 GB/s which pretty much removes memory bandwidth as a bottleneck in most applications. Unfortunately, even though this card does have double the GPUs and double the memory of the K40, it doesn’t quite have double the memory bandwidth, which once again points to a likelihood of lower memory clock speeds than the K40. If one were to simply double the K40’s memory bandwidth, you would be looking at 566 GB/s, not the current 480 GB/s on the K80, but even so, this pretty much dwarfs anything on the market by over 150 GB/s anyways.

That card would be AMD’s own FirePro W9100, which has been very competitive with Nvidia’s K40 and offers 2,816 stream processors, 16GB GDDR5 memory and 320 GB/s memory bandwidth. This comes out to a peak performance of 5.24 teraflops peak single-precision floating-point performance and 2.62 teraflops peak dual-precision floating-point performance, meaning that now the ball is back in AMD’s court with today’s announcement.

In fact, Nvidia’s Tesla compute cards are also enabling some of the most recent scientific breakthroughs like the ongoing Rosetta mission that the ESA has embarked upon, which most recently landed a probe on a comet. “The Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators are up to 10 times faster than CPUs when enabling scientific breakthroughs in some of our key applications, and provide a low energy footprint,” said Wolfgang Nagel, director of the Center for Information Services and HPC at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. “Our researchers use the available GPU resources on the Taurus supercomputer extensively to enable a more refined cancer therapy, understand cells by watching them live, and study asteroids as part of ESA’s Rosetta mission.”

There is currently no pricing information available for the K80 based on the information we were given by Nvidia, however you can probably ballpark that it will cost upwards of $5000 since the K40 originally sold for that price but has since been discounted down to $3,000 very likely in anticipation of today’s announcement. In terms of availability, Nvidia Tesla K80 dual-GPU compute cards will be available from a variety of server manufacturers, including ASUS, Bull, Cirrascale, Cray, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Inspur, Penguin, Quanta, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from NVIDIA reseller partners.

The post Nvidia Launches Tesla K80 Dual Kepler Compute Card appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI : The Start Of A HTPC

VR World Staff — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 00:58:44 +0000

When considering a new HTPC build a lot should be taken into account, and a big part of that should be the motherboard, If size is to be kept to a minimum then the obvious choice for a motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board. If it should be power efficient then the AMD APU lineup is a good starting place since it has decent GPU and CPU power. Choosing something that fits both of those criteria will mean that a A88X Mini-ITX board is likely on the list. This Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI will fit the bill nicely since it has a lot of features that a user will want when building a HTPC and not a lot of unnecessary fluff filling up the already cramped board.

The HTPC is a great option for those who have a lot of media that they have accumulated over the years and want to watch on a tv or home cinema. There are plenty of large HTPC builds that users can do with a simple ATX sized board and a big case. But for those looking for something a bit smaller that will look great next to the tv or in the home cinema the Mini-ITX solutions are often the best. They will be compact builds and many of the HTPC cases for them look great and will blend right in with current components that users may have or will be getting.

Overview

Gigabyte is a well known and trusted brand and its boards are many peoples first choice when it comes to picking a new motherboard. They have a couple different choices of A88X Mini-ITX boards. The only current AMD chipset Mini-ITX boards that you can find on sites like Newegg are the A88X boards. So they made sure that people have a few choices in that small segment, which is great for selecting a board that will suit your needs. This board sits at the top of the lineup and it comes packaged with a dual band 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 add-in card. This means that the board is up to date with the speediest Wi-Fi standard available, and will be able to operate at speeds of up to 867Mbps.

The board offers a few features to enhance this board. The board has Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 4 Plus, meaning that the board is built with good quality components that should stand up to stress that may come from certain setups. The board also uses all solid capacitors and Low RDS(on) MOSFETs which will work at higher temperatures and have longer lifespans. This board also features DualBIOS which means that users will have a second BIOS to fall back on if the first one has issues, such as a failed BIOS flash. Humidity Protection, Power Failure Protection, and Electrostatic Protection are all in the board as well. Also on the board is ESD protection for USB and LAN, as well as one fuse per USB 3.0 porst.

AMD Eyefinity technology is available for those who choose to use this as a small desktop build with multiple monitors. This board also has two HDMI ports instead of having multiple different options. With using a qualified AMD APU and GPU that have Dual Graphics technology the board will use both the discrete GPU and the APU to deliver better graphics performance. 4K Ultra HD support is there right out of the box as well via HDMI ports.

Specifications:

Model: GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XN-WIFI
CPUs: FM2+ / FM2 Athlon/A- Series
Chipset: AMD A88X (Bolton D4)
Memory: 2×240pin Dual Channel DDR3 2133/1866/1600/1333
Maximum Memory Supported: 64GB
Expansion Slot: PCI Express 3.0 x16
Mini Card Slots: 1 x mini-PCI Express slot for the wireless module
SATA: 4 x SATA 6Gb/s
SATA RAID: 0/1/5/10/JBOD
Audio: Realtek ALC892 / 7.1 Channels
LAN: Realtek 10/100/1000Mbps
Wireless: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with Bluetooth 4.0, 3.0+HS, 2.1+EDR

Rear Panel Ports

1x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
1 x DVI-D
2 x HDMI
2 x USB 3.0
4 x USB 2.0
1 x Optical
5x Audio Ports

Internal I/O Connectors

2 x USB 3.0 + 2 x USB 2.0
1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector
1 x 4-pin ATX 12V power connector
1 x APU fan header
1 x system fan header
1 x front panel header
1 x front panel audio header
1 x S/PDIF Out header
1 x Clear CMOS jumper
1 x chassis intrusion header

Physical Spec

Mini ITX
6.7″ x 6.7″
Power Pin: 24 Pin

Features

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 4 Plus Technology
IR Digital 4+2 phase APU power design
GIGABYTE UEFI DualBIOS
Support for @BIOS
Support for Q-Flash
Support for Xpress Install
Support for EasyTune
Support for Smart Recovery 2
Support for ON/OFF Charge
Support for Wi-Fi Share
Support for Cloud Station

The post Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI : The Start Of A HTPC appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Launches GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI

Harish Jonnalagadda — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 15:51:23 +0000

After unveiling the unique water-cooled GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI system at Computex earlier this year, Gigabyte (TPE: 2376) has announced commercial availability. As the name indicates, the WaterForce Tri-SLI system features three video cards in SLI and a custom closed-loop cooling solution.

The configuration involves fitting three GTX 980 cards in SLI, with the liquid cooling provided by a dedicated case that can be mounted above an enclosure. The external case features a dedicated 120mm radiator for each GTX 980 video card, and comes with a control panel at the front through which you can adjust an individual card’s settings manually. The LCD screen at the front shows information about pump and fan speeds, noise levels as well as temperatures.

The cards themselves are factory overclocked variants, and come with core clocks of 1228 MHz and a boost clock of 1329 MHz. Memory bandwidth is at 7.00 GHz. The liquid coolant running through each card also cools the memory and VRM. To ensure that the entire configuration fits securely into your system, Gigabyte is including an SLI bridge, 5.25-inch front panel bezel through which the coolant tubes make their way out of the cabinet and a reinforcement beam (so that the sheer weights of the cards does not bend the motherboard). The vendor is also throwing in grommets for users looking to effectively manage all the coolant tubes.

The SKU for the system is N980X3WA-4GD, although there is no indication as to when this would hit retail. Also, there is no confirmation from Gigabyte as to how much the GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI would cost, but initial estimates suggest that the system would cost in the vicinity of $3000. It remains to be seen whether there is any need for such an elaborate video card configuration, but then again we live in a world where Nvidia is able to successfully sell the Titan Z.

The post Gigabyte Launches GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Launches First Mini-ITX GTX 970

Sam Reynolds — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:04:09 +0000

Who says the Mini-ITX form factor can’t be used for gaming? Gigabyte (TPE: 2376) unveiled this week its new GTX 970 card, and the card designed for miniaturized computers packs some serious processing power — more than enough for most gamers.

The Mini-ITX GTX 970 comes factory overclocked with a base clock of 1076 MHz and a boost clock of 1216 MHz. With a TDP of 145W, it’s powered by a single 8-pin PCI-Express power connector.

As far as cooling goes, Gigabyte includes its own WindForce 3X cooler. The “3X” does not denote three fans, but rather three heat pipes. Benchmarks provided by Gigabyte (these have not been independently verified) show that the the WindForce cooler is able to keep the card at a comfortable 62 degrees while running the Metro: Last Light benchmark. In comparison, a reference card running the same benchmark would come in at 76 degrees.

Pricing for the card starts at $329.99 with availability slated to begin in November.

The post Gigabyte Launches First Mini-ITX GTX 970 appeared first on VR World.

Report Claims to Solve Mystery of Socket 2084

Sam Reynolds — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 16:00:47 +0000

At an overclocking event during last month’s IDF in San Francisco, VR World reported on the mystery of the extra pins on Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Haswell-E CPUs — known as socket 2084 — and what exactly the corresponding sockets on motherboards are supposed to be used for.

Asus (TPE: 2357) claims that these pins are for overclocking, giving users increased reliability. Industry sources that spoke to VR World claim otherwise, stating earlier that these sockets and pins had the more mundane purpose of CPU debugging and testing. Intel, for its part, remains silent on the topic repeatedly directing the press to board partners for further comment.

Now a report from Hardware.info citing German overclocker Roman Hartung, better known by the handle Der8auer, claims to have the answer to this mystery. Hartung modified his Gigabyte board (TPE: 2376) (Gigabyte does not currently utilize the socket in question on its respective boards for overclocking) to deliver power to the specific pins, and found out that post-modification higher uncore overclock speeds were indeed possible.

(Photo credit: Roman Hartung)

While its clear now that the potential use of this socket was not entirely a figment of the Asus marketing department’s imagination, Intel has yet to publicly give a definite answer on whether utilizing this socket for overclocking would void the CPU’s warranty.

The post Report Claims to Solve Mystery of Socket 2084 appeared first on VR World.

Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo?

Nebojsa Novakovic — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 05:49:22 +0000

Intel’s launch of the Haswell-based Core i7 5960X and the associated X99 chipset with DDR4 memory has required a brand new series of motherboards as well. The four major vendors – Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and Asrock – grabbed the chance to introduce other new features into the just launched platform to entice the users to upgrade.

Recently, Bright Side of News* reviewed Intel’s flagship CPU with Gigabyte’s X99-Gaming 5 motherboard, which by itself is a decent balance between top performance, features and compact size. How about the flagship mainboard in Gigabyte line, Gaming G1 WiFi?

At 305 x 259 mm, the board itself is a bit larger than the usual 305 x 244 mm ATX size, but should still fit comfortably into most enthusiast oriented large casings, like the one from Antec used in this review. The first look at the X99-Gaming G1 WiFi reveals quite a stunning board, almost overloaded with all the bells and whistles one could ask for – up to 64 GB RAM if using 8 GB DDR4 DIMMs, plenty of PCIe slots for Quad GPU operation, and still three x1 slots squeezed in between. Add to it every single interface (minus Thunderbolt) on board, including SATA Express, eSATA, M2 slots, plenty of USB interfaces, and the icing on the cake: dual Gigabit Ethernet, one of which is Qualcomm Atheros KillerNIC, and Creative SoundCore 3D “quasi-DSP” with gold plated shielding. On the last one, it’s a pity that it’s still not the old Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi, as that one was more of a true audio processor that offloads the CPU from handling the audio.

As for Thunderbolt, separating it off the main board may end up to be a smart approach after all, as the 20 Gbps Thunderbolt 2 is still maturing, and there’s a question whether the users want a single port, dual port, or – for now – no ports.

Overview and testing

The board quality, from the PCB manufacture to the components used, whether in the power department, connectors, interfaces or audio amplifiers, is top notch, something that was once seen on Asus’ early ROG boards some years ago. The design and manufacturing control is still in Taiwan, by the way, which seems to help a bit in achieving operational reliability and less RMA headache for Gigabyte itself.

The board was tested with the i7-5960X CPU and Micron’s reference Crucial quad channel DDR4-2133 kit. The latter doesn’t have any fancy heat spreaders and such, however it is the reference kit coming from the memory die vendor itself, and it doesn’t block the internal airflow with the otherwise mostly useless heat spreader decorations than that gaming memory kits usually have. The cooler was Thermaltake’s Water 3 Pro – easy to install and good enough for say 30% or so overclocks satisfactory for most users, but not more.

In this early review, we looked at the BIOS tuning options, the Gigabyte auto overclocking choices as well as something not usually focused on in performance tests: the selected benchmark performance dependency on the CPU uncore (i.e. cache and memory controller) and memory bandwidth and latency settings. The subsequent review parts will focus on other benchmarks and further CPU and memory tuning experiences.

Sandra 2014

Here are the results from default all the way to 4.3 GHz. See the variations once the CPU uncore and memory come into picture:

CineBench 15

Same here – even though CPU compute-heavy ray tracing render routines are usually little memory bound, there are small but measurable benefits from tuning up the uncore and memory, as you see here (note: Cinebench could not detect true CPU clock speed).

At the start, I felt it could be related to the particular CPU sample used, or even the cooler limits, but the plateau for stable performance on this particular board was 4.3 GHz with Turbo turned off, with uncore set at 3.2 GHz. This by itself is a no mean feat, as – for the current Haswell-E at least – I’d not run the CPU at anything higher than 4.0 GHz for regular everyday operation, if intending to keep it up and running nicely for at least a year until the Broadwell-E refresh comes in handy. For a start, the i7-5960X at 4 GHz with 3.2 GHz uncore and DDR4-2400 CL 14-14-14 memory is a very decent top end setup by any means.

After all, even though the Haswell-E/EP high end parts were made in three die versions: 8-core, 12-core and 18-core (the latter two only as Xeons for workstations and servers), it’s logical to expect that, within given TDP tolerances, only the 8-core version would overclock sufficiently above the base setting, like above 30% with standard board and cooling stuff. The Gigabyte overclocking competition at IDF, that we covered here, reached the 6 GHz barrier on LN2 with some CPUs, but that is of course not a production setting.

A look at the board in-operation.

I went ahead with a BIOS update from default F4 to the latest F8c BIOS version, just released this weekend, which promised to solve lots of early issues and improve tuning. However, the results were overall about the same in this round, so yes it could be that the CPU itself was kind of topping out at 4.3 GHz for stable production work. Either way, more memory modules await us to try how far we can go with the memory overclock. Whether upgrading this board as well to that “OC Socket 2084” seen on Asus Rampage V Extreme and Gigabyte X99 LN2 board is a benefit, we should know soon too.

In conclusion, the Gaming G1 is probably the most feature rich X99 based high end board in the market right now, based on the bells and whistles. The overclocking side may leave a bit more desired on the extreme side, but we’ll try it anyway with other CPU and memory samples soon.

This post originally appeared on VR World, Bright Side of News’* Asia Pacific news portal.

The post Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo? appeared first on VR World.

Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo?

Nebojsa Novakovic — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 04:22:23 +0000

VR World’s sister site, Bright Side of News* reviewed Intel’s flagship CPU with Gigabyte’s X99-Gaming 5 motherboard, which by itself is a decent balance between top performance, features and compact size. How about the flagship mainboard in Gigabyte line, Gaming G1 WiFi?

Overview and testing

Sandra 2014

Here are the results from default all the way to 4.3 GHz. See the variations once the CPU uncore and memory come into picture:

CineBench 15

A look at the board in-operation.

The post Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo? appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte’s Aire M93 Wireless Mouse Works On Any Surface

Harish Jonnalagadda — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:38:39 +0000

Gigabyte is well-known for its motherboards, but the manufacturer also makes peripherals like mice and keyboards. Today, the hardware vendor has launched its latest offering in this segment, the Aire M93 Ice wireless mouse. Weird naming convention aside, the mouse is the first to use Gigabyte’s Ice technology, which gives you the ability to use the mouse on any high-gloss surface, including glass, leather, stone, wood, and cloth.

Hardware-wise, the mouse features a four-direction tilt wheel, a free scrolling key that lets you navigates websites with ease, customizable buttons, on-the-fly DPI adjustment, and a micro-USB port that allows you to charge the batteries by plugging in a micro-USB cable. You wouldn’t have to do so frequently, as Gigabyte claims a three month battery life on the 2100 mAh battery. To change button configurations, you would need to use Gigabyte’s software, which works on all Windows versions after Windows XP.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a mouse that tracks on glass. Logitech has debuted a similar sensor technology called Darkfield, which allows the mouse to work on any surface. Logitech has many mice that can track on glass, but the one that stands out the most is the Wireless MX Performance, which is considered to be the best wireless mouse around. For all its ergonomic advantages, the Wireless MX is a large mouse, but Gigabyte’s offering is considerably smaller, with dimensions of 113 x 71 x 42 mm versus the 128.3 x 83.5 x x 47 mm sported by the Wireless MX.

Gigabyte’s Aire M93 looks like a great offering for users seeking a wireless mouse that can track on any surface, but the lack of software drivers for Mac is a bit of a letdown. Considering that this is being branded as a mainstream mouse and not something catered to the gaming segment, software compatibility with the Mac operating system would have been a valuable addition.

Pricing isn’t detailed yet, but the mouse is slated for worldwide availability later this month.

The post Gigabyte’s Aire M93 Wireless Mouse Works On Any Surface appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte GA-X99-GAMING 5: A Solid Performer

VR World Staff — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 04:21:26 +0000

Intel recently released the Haswell-E CPUs and the X99 chipset to go along with it. Gigabyte has released their line of X99 to the masses with eight new boards. Gigabyte’s GA-X99 Gaming 5 is in the lower mid-range of the new board lineup, and has some promising features for the gamers that it is hoping to target. While the Gaming 5 may not have the slew of options for overclocking and performance tuning that the top of the line GA-X99-SOC Force but does have enough options to keep a serious system tweaker busy for days. Thankfully, with all those options the board still proves to be an easy overclocker.

GA-X99-GAMING 5

The board is based on the X99 chipset which means it uses the new DDR4 in quad channel configuration. It also has the Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2201 Gigabit Ethernet, which is supposed to help your online gaming with lower latency. I have used the Killer E220x series of network adapters and I am thoroughly pleased with the results that I have had with them. The sound is handled by the dedicated Creative’s Sound Core3D which does a superb job of providing audio in games. Gigabyte actually goes as far as to isolate the X99 Gaming 5’s audio components from the rest of the electronics on the board to reduce interference. The best feature of this audio setup by far is the Recon mode, which when enabled pumps up sounds that were originally faint to help give you an advantage. In Battlefield 4 I was able to get the jump on people because I heard them coming from a distance and had time to prep myself. There is a downside to the Core3D which is that those faint sounds will sometimes throw you off, sometimes hearing something new in a game that you have played many times before can definitely throw you off. With that said let’s look at what really is the focus of the testing today, the performance of the board with the 5960X.

PS/2 ports, 4 DAC-Up USB to provide cleaner power (yellow ports), Q-Flash Plus port (white), Killer GbE LAN, and Gold Plated audio jacks

This board has been downright packed with features by Gigabyte. One of the very useful additions on this board is that of the Q-Flash Plus, it allows you to update the BIOS via USB drive without the CPU or memory needing to be installed. The board is also ready for Thunderbolt 2 and has an onboard header to support a Gigabyte Thunderbolt add-in card. The board sports Ambient LED that has LEDs on the motherboard and a lighted rear I/O shield. These LEDs can be set up in BIOS to pulse, light to the audio being played, on, and off ( This will look great with a side window case).

Storage Options: 10x SATA 6Gb/s, 1x SATA Express, 1x M.2 ( another M.2 is for a WiFi card)

The Board also supports 4-way SLI and 4-way Crossfire with up to 320Gb/s of bandwidth for graphics. M.2 support is here with up to 10 Gb/s of transfer speed, while a secondary M.2 slot is available for a WiFi add in card. The x16 PCI-E slots, DIMM slots, and the CPU socket have a 30 micron thick coating of gold plating on the contacts. This is a lot more than standard designs so as to help make better electrical connections between components and ensure enduring performance. One very nice thing about the audio is that if has a gain switch and a user replaceable OP-AMP so that you can tailor it to your needs. Replacement OP-AMPs can be found easily on the internet and eBay and will allow you to change the audio characteristics.

Creative Sound Core3D audio processor with Nichicon audio capacitors and a user replaceable OP-AMP.

The bios is laid out nicely and once you get the hang of it you can fly through the sections easily for making changes. The 5960X was easily overclocked by simply raising the core voltage to 1.3v and changing the multiplier to 45x. The XMP profile of the Corsair LPX 2666 DDR4 easily loaded for its default profile of 2666 15-17-17-50 at 1.2v. At 2400 the memory was able to run at 13-14-14-28 1T with the voltage bumped up to 1.4v. The second XMP profile was for 2800 at 1.35v and had trouble loading up even with everything else at stock. Troubleshooting was made very difficult for the fact that there was no LED display for post codes. This made troubleshooting the overclocking efforts akin to flying blind since you will need to fall back on your knowledge of what it could be if you run into issues. Pushing through that it was hard to complete much of any memory OC, although it was more than possible to raise the voltage and tighten the timings down. The uncore frequency went to almost 3600MHz and that allowed for some impressive memory bandwidth measurements. Overall, the board would perform very well, but it would have a hiccup which meant pulling in the reigns since troubleshooting was proving difficult. To clear the cmos there is a jumper on the board that needs to be shorted. These are two glaring checks in the cons section for the board since for the price one would hope those are something that you would get at a minimum.

Test System
• Intel 5960X 3625MHz (125MHz x 29) and 4500 (125MHz x 36)
• Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5
• Corsair LPX DDR4-2666 4x4GB 15-17-17-50 ( @ 1T w/ NB @ 3600MHz / @ 2133 15-15-15-35 1T for 3.6GHz)
• MSI R9 290X Lightning
• Cooler Master V1200 Platinum PSU
• Corsair V64 SSD
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme cooler
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Compared System
• Intel 4960X 3600MHz (100MHzx36)
• Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3
• Kingston DDR3-2400 4x4GB @ 2133 11-12-12-30 2T
• Patriot 128GB SSD
• R9 295X2
• Thermaltake 1475 Platinum
• Corsair H100 CPU cooler
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

AIDA64 – memory benchmark

The Copy and Read scores go up nicely with the increase in speed of the processor, and the scores are clearly dominated by the DDR4. The Write scores are a bit lower, which is likely attributed to the increased latency that the DDR4 has. With a bit of tuning the timings could be tightened over the stock memory specs to bring up the write speed.

SiSoft Sandra – Memory Bandwidth

The latency of the DDR3 on the 4960X system again is likely helpful to give it such a big boost in the Integer memory bandwidth benchmark. The decent uncore speed on both systems really helps both in bandwidth results. The bandwidth really increases as well with the increase in speed.

SiSof Sandrat – Arithmetic

The 5960X Processor Arithmetic results are altready improved with the addition of 4 threads over the 4960X. The increase in the Dhrystone results is quite impressive when compared to the gains that the Whetstone results showed.

3DMARK – Physics

5960Xwith it’s 16 threads really is a marked improvement over the 12 threads of the 4960X in the physics tests. At 4.5 makes some very good gains in the results.

Super Pi 32m

This The bandwidth increase really helps out the 5960X achieve some great results, Super Pi s a single threaded benchmark that relies heavily on cpu and memory speed and memory timings to improve the efficiency of the runs.

WPrime 1024M

WPrime is a multithreaded benchmark that shows the 5960X making good headway at a compared 3.6 with the addition of 4 threads. The results really gain traction at 4.5 with those 16 threads.

UCBench

UCBench is a benchmark that is multithreaded and really shows an improvement with those additional threads churning out more passwords per second. The speed increase makes a huge impact on the results of UCBench.

So is this something you should get?

There are some drawbacks indeed when it comes to some basic features being excluded from this board in the form of cmos clear button and led post display. But as you can see, this board does have the performance there to carry you to a decent OC if you want, you will just need to have patience when doing so. For a $294 the GA-X99-GAMING 5 a solid candidate for a system, especially if you can take advantage of the integrated features when gaming. If you are looking for something easier to troubleshoot the GA-X99-GAMING G1 would be a great choice as it has an expanded feature set and a debug led display.

The post Gigabyte GA-X99-GAMING 5: A Solid Performer appeared first on VR World.

Mini-ITX 4 GHz Haswell: Climbing the 'Devil’s Canyon' With Size Constraints?

Nebojsa Novakovic — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 06:22:36 +0000

Ever thought of an ultra-small, yet fully overclockable, high speed desktop PC squeezed inside the compact Mini-ITX platform? A combination of Intel’s Core i7-4790X and Gigabyte GA-Z97N board could give you that, just watch the Mini-ITX size and power limits.

First, with its jacked up CPU and GPU core speeds, the “Devil’s Canyon” 4 GHz four-core Haswell does have enough muscle to drive a home-theatre UHD 3840×2160 TV platform, in everything minus the 3D games. The latter point would, of course, have to wait for some substantial GPU architecture refresh within Intel, something not likely until Skylake platform a year and half from now.

System overview

A UHD home theatre PC with OC capability may not be the first thing that comes to one’s mind when matching the desired features, however Taiwan vendors did create the solution anyway. One of the best such boards available is the GA-Z97N Gaming from Gigabyte, which was matched for testingwith the i7-4790X. The other key components used were a pair of Kingston 4 GB HyperX DDR3-2400 DIMMs, and GELID SlimHero 4-heat pipe heat sink fan unit. As you will see, the Kingstons did manage to even improve on the default latency while cutting 3% of the default voltage required, while GELID SlimHero nicely covers both the VRM and DIMM parts for a bit of extra airflow to avoid need for a separate system fan altogether.

Back to the motherboard: knowing that overclocking the 4 GHz Haswell to somewhere around 4.5 GHz before Turbo, plus running the memory at highspeed, and still providing for an optional PCIe v3 GPU, was already a tall order for even a mATX mobo, I was pleasantly surprised that Gigabyte managed to squeeze far more into it.

A combination of (now Qualcomm) KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet and PCIe WiFi, 4 SATA plus 1 eSATA, all 6 Gbps, Realtek1150 audio codes, and, yes, still having one PS/2 keyboard or mouse connector besides the USB, just in case. The video interface portion didn’t disappoint either,

with DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort – but no Thunderbolt, though. And then, you would notice the 24+8 power connectors, the full complement needed for a decent OC gaming platform feeding a high end GPU, all in a Mini-ATX format.

For this first look, I put up the system to run in the open, before finding a truly good Mini-ATX casing and PSU that would do it justice – not an easy task knowing this compact format’s limitations. The setup, including CPU, HSF and memory, took all of ten minutes, and, this being a Mini-ATX board, it was darn easy to handle the connectors and cables.

Even though the default BIOS was dated April – and I would try to keep it as long as I can, since it keeps the TSX transaction memory extensions turned on, unlike the versions from June onwards – it fully supported the i7-4790X out of the box, including the 4 GHz default frequency and 4.4 GHz Turbo. The CPU voltage was a little high in my mind, going at 1.35 V, so, as incrementally overclocking it, I managed to find a sweet spot of 4.6 GHz default frequency at 1.32 volts CPU voltage. The resulting CPU Tcase temperature also dropped to 45 degrees Celsius, as you can see in the lovely FullHD UEFI BIOS screenshot.

In the same screenshot, you can see that I managed to slightly tune the Kingston memory and reduce the latency to 11-12-12 at DDR-2400 while dropping the voltage a bit to 1.6 volts. This is only a minor first round tune in to basically lower the power requirements ever so slightly so that a standard 150W Mini-ITX/ITX PSU can handle the whole box including a SSD and a DVD/BD-ROM drive.

Talking about UEFI BIOS, It looks great and gives out a lot of info, but, frankly, functionality wise, all that was there in the old text-mode BIOS user interfaces anyway, and there would be less system overhead with them. Having FullHD UEFI doesn’t save you from having to

toggle multiple screens still, and sometimes there can be a slight lag in getting a setting applied and in effect. Luckily, Gigabyte still provides the text mode BIOS option here.

More to come

So, what to say after this first look? From the point of achievable performance and features, the combo of Intel Devil’s Canyon and Gigabyte GA-Z97N Gaming Mini-ITX board gives up almost nothing compared to much larger format OC platforms, unless you need much more RAM or dual GPUs, among other things. It would be even more fun if Intel’s graphics was yet another step better for actual 3-D game use, but then, I guess, that’s a beyond-Broadwell question for those who’d be willing to wait for “GT4” graphics in Skylake CPU generation. If, aside of 3-D gaming, you’re happy with UHD capable setup that can nicely handle your new high-end TV and still allows an extra GPU if you move it to a little bigger casing, then this is the thing for you.

Based on this initial experience – upcoming benchmarks notwithstanding, since they will be in line with other similar Devil’s Canyon platforms – I would recommend the setup with this Gigabyte board for a Mini-ITX HTPC, on one condition: it should not be fitted into the tightest Mini-ITX casings out there.

Give it a bit of room to spare, including one for a bit better PSU than what Mini-ITX boxes usually supply. Here I ran it with a standard 500W ATX PSU for the initial stability purposes, however the main review will include trying out a few Mini-ITX casing and PSU combos on it right out of Shenzhen factories in a week’s time – after all, it will be one of our Mini-ITX reference platforms until Broadwell shows itself.

The post Mini-ITX 4 GHz Haswell: Climbing the 'Devil’s Canyon' With Size Constraints? appeared first on VR World.

Post-Computex Blues – Yet Another Bloodbath on the Horizon

Nebojsa Novakovic — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 20:01:27 +0000

Or… The Vendors Never Learn

It’s been a full 2 weeks now since the end of Computex, and the associated roaming around Greater China and certain (mostly Chinese speaking too) neighboring realms. This being at the very least fifteenth Computex for me, I didn’t bother much with press conferences and such, but checking the show floor to see what’s really going on, and then do a real check with selected vendors after the event is done with.

The Taiwanese, with diminishing focus on high end ‘added value’ PC stuff, moving towards mainstream consumer things with corresponding reduction in differentiation and ability to charge larger margins, in some cases increasingly relying on reference designs – tablets could be a repeat of the same story as graphics cards here. The Asus Transformer tablet range is still one of rare exceptions to at least aim there where higher margin Samsung or LG offerings are entrenched, for example.

Asus doesn’t seem to be so lucky with the ROG enthusiast board line, where Gigabyte has, according to more than one insider, claimed the quality prize and is now at the very least on an equal footing for the high end PC market board dominance race prior to the September Haswell-E next-gen Socket 2011 platform launch (the socket is NOT compatible with the current Socket 2011, just to state one more time).

So… The Big Four: Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and (still for now) AMD, all US vendors, still carry the innovation torch and, willingly or not, have to lead the OEMs into what to design and manufacture to a great extent. Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 convertibles were just an example, other stuff is just the same. Intel lost billions in the last financial year investing in an attempt to lead the mobile phone and tablet segments. Of course, they have the size & strength to ride over it without much impact thanks to over divisions, but a loss is still a loss, something very uncommon for Intel.

It’s funny… even despite all the Computex announcements, the best tablet announced at the time was not in Taipei, but in New York – Microsoft Surface 3 Pro (which we’re currently reviewing). It sports a proper Intel Core processor, proper 3:2 ratio display, proper (for tablet at least) keyboard cover, and proper OS, as much as one can call Windows 8.1 that – at least vs Android. Even though, Intel did have a Surface Pro 3 at their suite at Computex.

Then we come to the sea of mainland China vendors from Shenzhen, Dongguan and other cities, in their little booths at the old Taipei WTC hall. Plenty of them offering plenty of stuff, but it seems they aren’t willing to learn the key lesson from their Taiwan brethren: don’t you all want to avoid making the same cheap crap, trying to make a dollar a piece and then bleeding each other’s margins to death with endless fights for every customer? While only the SoC and IP license owners make any money from it all?

When I asked Intel if they have a role to play in this situation, one of their regional honchos in-charge, Leighton Phillips, Director Product Marketing, Intel Asia Pacific & Japan, explained that Intel is not the one restricting the components ecosystem for Intel-based tablets and such, but the choice is mostly on vendors themselves. After all, in his words, “Shenzhen city is like one really big company itself.” where certain “departments” decide to focus on repeating the low-cost stuff en masse and, hopefully, some bigger boys – or the daring ones with guts – decide to do unique things. Like it or not, after being in that city for years now on-and-off, I find it hard to disagree with this: many attempts to convince even the large groups there – even with ready buyers – to do something beyond the el cheapo fare, hit the risk-aversion wall. It’s a pity, as the Chinese government itself is more strategically focused on developing core technologies than, say, Taiwan.

After all, even outside the Intel world, a good example where a ‘me too’ strategy leads long term is one really big long time OEM in Hong Kong that survives – pitifully at that – basically selling their boards and cards at material cost. Yet, for years now, their very survival depends on their single principal vendors’ marketing money – which could be shut off anytime knowing that principal’s own survival issues.

Intel is, of course, investing a lot in Shenzhen: having (quite rightfully) selected it to be their next major hardware design center worldwide, after the USA and Taiwan. The rumors I hear from the insiders are for close to 700 engineering staff to be hired in Intel’s coming new space, likely in one of city’s many modern science & tech parks, within this year and early next – far more than the official 150 staff mentioned up to now. Whether this will encourage the local companies to do more daring product designs as Intel helps them offload the engineering risks to some extent, remains to be seen soon. The city really must not repeat the mistakes of Taipei, cornered now into doing low-margin ecosystem stuff for the real technology principals.

They aren’t the only ones – Nvidia is also strongly present here, even organizing organic farming fun for its Shenzhen staff, and Qualcomm is preparing their positions in the new hardware Mecca. After all, everything from smartphones to supercomputers are both designed and used here. Only AMD is missing, without even an office to call home here… tells you something, doesn’t it?

That also serves as a warning to Taipei, that – irrespective of the simple cheap stuff shown in their little booths – Shenzhen is on target to take more and more of Taiwan’s IT pie in the near future; you will be looking at reports from their IT fairs here in the next year and beyond as well. So, Taiwan must do what Japan did as well, and boldly go to the top end of technology and produce stuff for the top tier of the users, willing to pay stuff for it. A good reference are Japanese products shown at Singapore’s BroadcastAsia show last week – cameras and monitors for US$ 30K and above EACH, and workstations controlling them costing not much less. And, they sell well… why bother selling million Fiats when thousand Ferraris could make more?

The post Post-Computex Blues – Yet Another Bloodbath on the Horizon appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Suite at Computex 2014, Mountains of Motherboards

Anshel Sag — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 07:01:43 +0000

As we had already covered most of what Gigabyte already had to announce from their new 9 series motherboards at the beginning of Computex, we were interested to see exactly what Gigabyte had to show us at their suite on the 36th floor of Taipei 101 (somewhere about 1/3 of the way up).

Taipei 101

After we got to their suite, we were greeted by Gigabyte’s Irene Huang, who graciously showed us around Gigabyte’s suite and introduced us to their full line of motherboards that they had announced earlier in the week. The first thing that caught our attention was Gigabyte’s walls of motherboards, with their new Ultra Durable line of boards to our right hand side. This Ultra Durable wall included both new 9 series boards as well as some older boards for AMD.

Gigabyte Ultra Durable Motherboards

As you can tell, Gigabyte has a multitude of Ultra Durable boards ranging from full ATX boards all the way down to Mini-ITX. After they showed us their Ultra Durable boards, Gigabyte explained to us about their Black Edition boards, which are their premium boards that are tested for 168 hours under extreme conditions under a constantly changing series of tests. These boards are designed to last longer because they’ve already been stress tested and they ultimately are awarded a 5 year warranty if they pass Gigabyte’s rigorous testing. According to company, the expectation is that these boards will only sell for about $20 USD more than the standard Ultra Durable or gaming boards that are made into Black Edition boards. And for that kind of price premium, I have a feeling many people are going to happily pay the price knowing that their boards are likely going to last forever. These may, however, end up getting snapped up by system integrators that know that these boards are far less likely to fail than any other motherboard on the market, making their jobs easier. Following that, we checked out Gigabyte’s Gaming line of motherboards, including a few interesting case mods that featured their latest Z97 boards, including a pretty attractive looking Z97 Mini-ITX board.

Gigabyte Gaming Motherboards

Gigabyte Z97 Mini-ITX Board

Gigabyte Hellboy Z97 Mod

They also had a 3 monitor car racing setup in their suite, which was powered by a modded system, pictured below.

Gigabyte Casemod

Meanwhile, all the time that we were going around Gigabyte’s suite their overclockers were busy using LN2 and prepping their boards for some world records. In fact, I believe they broke a record that day while at the suite, besting their previous record of 4.5 GHz DDR3 clock speed on Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC motherboard. They were using Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC and the Z97X-SOC Force boards to do some overclocking, both of which are some of Gigabyte’s newest overclocking motherboards. One not pictured, but used often during the week was the Z97X-SOC Force LN2 motherboard, which is a special board that only has two DIMM slots and no CPU mounting holes. This board is especially created for breaking memory clock speeds and CPU overclocking, which explains why Gigabyte continues to crush the memory clock speed world record. In fact, that speed was set at Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) event during Computex 2014 using Kingston’s DDR3 2933 MHz memory where Gigabyte’s team took first place.

The post Gigabyte Suite at Computex 2014, Mountains of Motherboards appeared first on VR World.

Kingston's HyperX OC Takeover Results

Anshel Sag — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 10:42:09 +0000

Kingston today held an overclocking competition with some of the world’s leading overclockers, their HOT (HyperX Overclocking Takeover). They offered a prize pool of $10,000 that would be distributed among the top 3 winners of 3 different benchmarks including Memory Clock speed, SuperPi 32M and Intel’s XTU. The teams were competing with eachother all day long and ultimately the majority of the competition was won by Team Gigabyte, who had utilized Kingston’s memory earlier in the week with their board to break the memory clock speed world record at 4.5 GHz.

Over the course of the day, the overclockers were competing to win the three different benchmarks. In the end, Team Gigabyte ended up hitting memory clock speeds of 2282.8 MHz which is an effective clock speed of 4.565 GHz on DDR3 memory that was originally clocked at 2.933 GHz. They ended up going home with $3,750 while TeamAU went home with $3,250 after getting 2nd place in all three benchmarks and finally Team China got $1,000 winning the SuperPi 32 benchmark.

HyperX OC Takeover Trophies

Kingston brought together all of these overclockers to show off how their HyperX memory is capable of some astonishing feats and will likely be able to go even higher than the current world record set at this event. 4.56 GHz is without a doubt an impressive memory clock speed and I have a feeling that there’s still a lot more to come from Gigabyte and Kingston in the coming days and weeks.

Kingston’s HyperX memory was well utilized by all of the teams present and will probably be used by a lot of the teams that competed today in order to try to get the best scores on the HWBot in the future as well to take their respective points. The winners today were certainly Team Gigabyte with their new Z97 boards as well as Kingston being able to get notoriety and yet another memory clock speed world record.

The post Kingston's HyperX OC Takeover Results appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Introduces New 9 Series Z97 Motherboards

Anshel Sag — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 13:29:04 +0000

As you would expect, Gigabyte has announced their new line of 9 series Intel chipset motherboards, with the primary focus being on their Z97 chipset motherboards. This time around, Gigabyte will have four different flavors of Z97 boards, which will support both 4th and 5th generation Intel Core processors. Gigabyte has rolled over a lot of the things from their Z87 line of motherboards, but also made some modifications and improvements to make the Z97 a worthwhile upgrade.

Gigabyte’s four different lines are their Gaming line, Ultra Durable line, Overclocking line and a new Black Edition line. The bulk of Gigabyte’s boards are going to be in their Ultra Durable line, which comes as a result of the fact that Gigabyte has decided to do away with the Ultra Durable numbering scheme, a good decision. In addition to that, Gigabyte is bringing more and more of their gaming and overclocking premium board features into their mainstream Ultra Durable line of boards. This is a welcome move because it simply improves the overall value of buying virtually any Gigabyte board. Some of those features include improved audio codecs and isolation as well as dual NICs and other gamer-focused innovations.

Gigabyte’s Z97 Gaming G1 Black Edition

However, in terms of excitement, Gigabyte’s most interesting announcement was the announcement of their Z97-OC LN2 board which is strictly an LN2 overclocking motherboard (or HE3). This board is especially interesting because of the way it was designed for optimal memory overclocking. This board recently broke the world record for the fastest memory, ever at 4.5 GHz, beating the previous record of 4.4 GHz on an ASUS board. It is a bit curious, though, that this new record isn’t being posted on HWBot, but maybe it will shortly… This Z97-OC LN2 board is special because it only has two memory slots and no mounting holes for the CPU. Because of these two major design decisions, this board is capable of overclocking memory higher than any board before it. And it was all done using Kingston memory, too.

The rest of Gigabyte’s line pretty much stays the same, gaining a few incremental upgrades here and there with the addition of M.2 connector and SATA Express support with the Z97 chipset. Obviously, not all boards will have these features but they will come and go through the product stack. The only new addition to Gigabyte’s line of boards are their Black Edition boards, which are Gigabyte’s premier quality boards designed and tested to last. All of Gigabyte’s Z97 Black Edition boards are designed for the ultimate durability, enduring 168 hours of grueling testing before being sent out to the customer accompanied by a 5 year warranty. Currently, Gigabyte only has three Black Edition boards, starting with a UD3 board, followed by a UD5 and finally completed with a G1 Gaming Z97 board which pretty much fills the Black Edition lineup with boards from all three different price and feature levels from Gigabyte.

The post Gigabyte Introduces New 9 Series Z97 Motherboards appeared first on VR World.

GeForce GTX285 on sale, our specs confirmed

Theo Valich — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:40:54 +0000

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been closely following what’s going on with the 55nm refresh from Nvidia. GT200b (GT200-100-B2) series chips begun their life in Quadro CX and FX4800/5800 cards, and then started selling as GeForce GTX260 55nm.

On January 8, 2009, Nvidia will officially introduce GeForce GTX285 1GB and GTX295 1.8 GB cards. Or that was the theory. As it usually happens, manufacturers “accidentally” started to sell early, and this time, the “honor” of going on sale first goes to GigaByte.

Thanks to HKEPC, we learned that two Hong Kong shops sell GTX285 by Gigabyte. This means GigaByte will be remembered as the first company to offer GTX285 on sale (first blood for GTX260 55nm went to EVGA). Prices are ranged between 410-440 USD, but you can expect it to drop further – this boards sell with at least $30-50 per store margin for being first (as usual).

GPU-wise, specifications are identical to Quadro FX 5800 – GPU is clocked to 648 MHz, while shaders are working at 1.48 GHz. GDDR3 memory is clocked to 1.24 GHz, meaning you have 158,976 MB/s or 155.25 GB/s to play with. Power consumption is set at 183W and this was the reason for putting 6+6-pin PEG connectors, instead of usual 8+6 configuration.
While this may be good news for owners of older PSUs without 8-pin PEG connector, overclockers will turn their heads to enthusiast manufacturers such as BFG, EVGA, PALIT and others for the 8+6 versions of the card. 6+6+PCIe slot can only provide 236W of power, meaning you have 53W for overclocking.

In the days of original GTX280, TDP was set at 236W and 8+6+PCIe slot configuration could provide 300W of juice – or 64W. Still, I may be wrong on this one, since Shamino recently broke 3DMark world record by using single GeForce GTX 285 card with 1.1 GHz core and 2 GHz Shader clock (you think Peter did that with a 65nm GPU? Think again )

The post GeForce GTX285 on sale, our specs confirmed appeared first on VR World.

VR World » Gigabyte

Gigabyte Overtakes Asus To Become Largest Motherboard Vendor In Q1 2015

A Peek Inside Gigabyte’s Suite at CES 2015

CES 2015: Seagate Launches The New Seven Portable Hard Drive

PC Enthusiats: What Can We Expect to See at CES 2015?

Gigabyte Introduces Force H1 Gaming Headphones

Nvidia Launches Tesla K80 Dual Kepler Compute Card

Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI : The Start Of A HTPC

Overview

Specifications:

Rear Panel Ports

Internal I/O Connectors

Physical Spec

Features

The post Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI : The Start Of A HTPC appeared first on VR World.

Gigabyte Launches GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI

Gigabyte Launches First Mini-ITX GTX 970

Report Claims to Solve Mystery of Socket 2084

Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo?

Overview and testing

Intel Core i7-5960X on Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WIFI: The Ultimate Enthusiast PC Combo?

Overview and testing

Gigabyte’s Aire M93 Wireless Mouse Works On Any Surface

Gigabyte GA-X99-GAMING 5: A Solid Performer

Compared System • Intel 4960X 3600MHz (100MHzx36) • Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 • Kingston DDR3-2400 4x4GB @ 2133 11-12-12-30 2T • Patriot 128GB SSD • R9 295X2 • Thermaltake 1475 Platinum • Corsair H100 CPU cooler • Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

So is this something you should get?

Mini-ITX 4 GHz Haswell: Climbing the 'Devil’s Canyon' With Size Constraints?

Post-Computex Blues – Yet Another Bloodbath on the Horizon

Or… The Vendors Never Learn

Gigabyte Suite at Computex 2014, Mountains of Motherboards

Kingston's HyperX OC Takeover Results

Gigabyte Introduces New 9 Series Z97 Motherboards

GeForce GTX285 on sale, our specs confirmed

Compared System
• Intel 4960X 3600MHz (100MHzx36)
• Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3
• Kingston DDR3-2400 4x4GB @ 2133 11-12-12-30 2T
• Patriot 128GB SSD
• R9 295X2
• Thermaltake 1475 Platinum
• Corsair H100 CPU cooler
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit