Following ASRock's early revelation of its Q77 motherboard, Gigabyte has decided to reveal its own Q77 motherboard in the shape of the GA-Q77M-D2H. For those not familiar with Gigabyte model names this is a micro ATX board with Ultra Durable 4 Classic and a wide range of display interfaces.
Nvidia's newest GK104 (Kepler) powered GeForce GTX 670, positioned to go against the HD 7950, is simply a GTX 680 with one of eight SMX units disabled and reduced core clock speed, retaining everything else like the 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus and 32 ROPs. We review GIGABYTE's non-reference take on the new US$399 entrant that really doesn't differ much from their flagship model.
Gigabyte's Z77X-D3H is one of the company's mid range offerings supporting the brand new Ivy Bridge range of processors. We are now allowed to show results with Ivy Bridge processors and can bring you a full review of this affordable Socket 1155 motherboard with a i7-3770K processor.
With rumours of Apple discontinuing its Mac Pro and potentially even more of its desktop Mac products in the future, building a DYI Hackintosh might very well be the only way to get a high-performance desktop Mac in the not too distant future. Details have emerged in the Hackingtosh community that it's easier than ever to create your own Hackintosh these days with a bit of help from Gigabyte's new 7-series motherboards with 3D BIOS UEFI.
When the GK104 based GeForce GTX 680 was first released, many pundits pointed out that the reference design had much room for improvement, especially in the power circuitry department which comes into play when overclocking. The GIGABYTE GTX 680 OC WindForce 3X that we have today attempts to address some of the shortfalls with a beefed up VRM and their custom triple fan cooler.
A little while ago VR-Zone had the opportunity to visit Gigabyte's Nan-Ping factory in Taiwan where the company makes most of its high-end motherboards, as well as some graphics card models, notebooks, smartphones and a few other things. We got a short video after the break showing you how Gigabyte's Z77 motherboards are being made, so click on through to the video.
We know many of you have been waiting for quite some time to get your hands on one of the very soon to launch – and already available in some countries – Intel 7-series chipset based motherboards. As such we thought it would be helpful to give a bit of an overview as to the pricing of some of the new boards and compare what you get for your money.
If you're a regular VR-Zone reader you might remember our massive USB 3.0 host controller test that we did back in August last year. As the first of Intel's new 7-series motherboards are starting to appear, we thought we'd do a quick test of Intel's native USB 3.0 host controller and compare how it stacks up to some of the best discrete controllers.
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One downside of Apple's many hand held devices is that they draw a lot of power when charging and the latest iPad is even more power hungry, especially when the battery is running low. As such it's getting to the stage where most computers will no longer be able to charge Apple's portable devices, although for DIY:ers it's less of an issue as many motherboards can deliver more power to the USB ports and in in the case of Gigabyte's new Z77 boards, the new iPad is no match.
The first images of a retail GTX 680 have appeared online thanks to Overclock.net forum member "ironman86" - a lucky lad who managed to get hold of a GIGABYTE model, box and all. The card with a designated model name of GV-N680D5-2GD-B strictly follows NVIDIA's reference design apart from some exclusive GIGABYTE sci-fi themed artwork.
We were fortunate enough to get a preview of Gigabyte's high-end 7-series chipset motherboards ahead of CeBIT, but it turned out that the company had plenty more on offer at CeBIT. As such, here's a fairly quick run-down of the new models on display at the show, as there are far too many products for us to cover them all in detail.
We're not entirely sure what's going on within Gigabyte, but currently it's ODM aka "whitebox" department has much more impressive tablet than its notebook division. That said, the GN-TB100 as the tablet is known as should at least arrive somewhere in retail, although under a different brand so it might take some figuring out as to who will be selling it.
Traditionally Gigabyte's consumer motherboard division has steered clear of the entry-level workstation market, so we were quite surprised to see its GA-X79S-UD5 board on display at CeBIT, although we'd been told that the company was working on such a product. The S in the model name apparently stands for server, although this is much more of a workstation product than a server product.
There's no denying that Ultrabooks haven't taken off like Intel hoped they would, but it looks like we looks forward to some much more interesting machines once Intel launches its Ivy Bridge ULV processors and Gigabyte has come up with an interesting take on the Ultrabook theme. The company's first foray into the Ultrabook market space is with the U2442 series which is a 14-inch notebook with a lot of interesting features under the bonnet.
Despite more and more features being integrated into the CPU, motherboard prices haven't exactly gotten any cheaper, although at least part of the reason for this is increased costs for the motherboard makers. However, Gigabyte has come up with an interesting board for those that are looking for something for a small business computer or similar in the shape of the GA-B75M-D3V which offers a well-rounded feature set without costing a fortune.
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