The 18th issue of the web's most popular overclocking magazine, The Overclocker is now online for your reading pleasure. With it comes some assistance in helping you choose the right X79 motherboard, an investigative look at the claimed inefficiency of ASUS' Crosshair V and a one-on-one chat with overclocking extraordinaire, Andrew "DrWeez" Roberts just to name a few highlights.
With AMD more or less pulling out of the high-end CPU market, it looks like the motherboard makers are following suit, at least if Gigabyte's latest AM3+ motherboard is anything to go by. The GA-970A-DS3 is part of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 4 Classic series which is a more affordable range of boards which is target towards your average consumer rather than performance junkies.
Thanks to increasing world market prices of copper, the major retail motherboard manufacturers are looking at increasing their motherboard prices by about 10 percent or so come April. This is bad news for Intel, as this will end up coinciding with Intel's launch of its Ivy Bridge processors and the new 7-series chipsets.
Updated: We've added a statement at the end of the article from Gigabyte, which states that the company is not about to increase its motherboard prices.
Today we take a look at MSI's flagship X79 motherboard. This feature packed overclocking board is aimed at anyone who wants something extreme. A 22 phase VRM coupled with quad SLI capability and every OC feature from direct OC buttons to manual PCI-E switches this board packs a strong punch, but does it live up to all the hype?
There aren't many old-school hardware enthusiasts that didn't own at least one of ABIT's products in the past. Now, one final remainder of the motherboard that brought us the legendary Celeron overclock is dying at the end of February.
It looks like Intel's new mobile Atom processors are finding their way onto several mini-ITX motherboards and Jetway has joined the fray with a low-profile model of its own, not that dissimilar to Intel's own DN2800MT in many ways. The NF9C as the model is called is clearly targeting the industrial PC market, unlike Intel's board, although it appears to be suitable for all-in-one systems making it a bit of an oddball board.
Our Chinese language site got a look at a couple of MSI Z77 motherboards back at CES, although early revisions and now pictures of what appears to be close to a final revision of a yet unseen Z77 motherboard has appeared online. The model in question is the Z77A-GD55, a slightly more basic model than what we've seen so far, albeit a reasonably feature rich board nonetheless.
LucidLogix made a technological breakthrough when introducing its first generation multi-GPU accomodating Hydra Engine to the world around 2 years ago now, which at the time by concept alone had people shouting out "Bravo!" thanks to the ability to mix up brands and models of graphics cards between the two major players, AMD and NVIDIA.
The issue is, Hydra's performance with a mixed config has never been astonishing in line of what can be harnessed in using a pair of duplicate cards in CrossFire or SLi. It is for this reason that most avid gamers and enthusiasts don't go down this road.
FORUMS
PRICEWATCH
VIDEOS
Today we are taking a look at the Gigabyte X79-UD5, an eight DIMM slot E-ATX motherboard and one of four models in the streamlined Gigabyte X79 range. This feature packed board brings several firsts for Gigabyte including a UEFI BIOS implementation and a digital PWM system.
With CES going on we almost missed that Intel quietly added all of its new Cedar Trail powered mini-ITX motherboards to its website. The company has launched five new models targeting a wide range of different market segments and some of the boards are actually quite decent, considering we're talking Intel motherboards here.
For those of you that are into small high-end motherboards, Zotac was showing off no less than three new models at CES intended for Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors. Two were based on the H77 chipset and one on the Z77 and in typical Zotac style all three features on-board Wi-Fi.
If you've been waiting for some more consumer friendly motherboards than the dual-socket workstation board we've seen so far from CES, then we have good news, we've got a few shots of Gigabyte's upcoming Intel 7-series motherboards. The boards on display at the show are far from the final versions and we do have some press shots to show as well, although at fairly low resolution, but it'll give you a better idea of what the final boards should look like.
Here's a treat for all hard core enthusiasts - an engineering sample of the upcoming Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge-EP 8 Cores, 16 Threads) was spotted by our team working on a ASUS ROG Rampage IV GENE motherboard, which was housed inside a small Thermaltake mATX lanparty box. This pretty much confirms internet rumors that have been going around for quite some time that the 8-core server part will work on regular 1P desktop boards, although not officially sanctioned or validated by Intel.
Performance zealots will remember the ASUS Z7S WS which went head on with then Intel 'Skulltrail' D5400XS Xeon luxury gaming platform (using dual unlocked QX9775 chips), but since then ASUS has done nothing of that sort, leaving EVGA with the iconic SR-2 to mop up things in the Xeon 55xx/56xx era. This is about to change with the imminent launch of the Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon E5 platform, and the ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS may well be the followup that power hungry gamers and high frequency traders are looking for.
Much like the Rampage and Maximus series of yesteryears, ASUS has a microATX "GENE" variant for its Republic of Gamers X79 offerings, built for small form factor setups but yet offering similar overclocking abilities to its bigger Formula and Extreme brothers. We take an exclusive look at the new Socket 2011 motherboard...
PREV
