Motherboards News - Page 39

Computex Taipei 2013 - Yesterday we were kindly invited to the GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei, Taiwan where we got a full introduction to its line-up of new Intel Z87 Express "Haswell" based motherboards, ahead of Computex Taipei 2013 which begins next week.

We got a look at its new gaming, overclocking and mainstream boards. Stew from GIGABYTE was kind enough to run us through the range. We get a look at the G1.Sniper 5, G1.Sniper M5, Z87X-OC, Z87X-OC Force, Z87X-UD5H and more.

It was clear from our visit that GIGABYTE has focused heavily on audio for this range of boards with some pretty amazing features such as its O-AMP Premium audio system. My first impression of all the boards was that they all look great. It's not unusual to have a couple good looking boards in a series, but when they all look good, it was a big surprise, in a good way.

ASRock has announced that their top-of-the-line Z87 Extreme9/ac is the first Intel 8 Series motherboard to be awarded Thunderbolt certification from Intel. The Z87 Extreme9/ac is ASRock's highest performance motherboard designed for Intel's upcoming Haswell CPU's.

Now the maestros of motherboard manufacturing, ASRock is the world's first to add more of these wonderful Thunderbolt ports to the upcoming Intel 8 Series motherboards! What's more, the company's top-of-the-line Z87 Extreme9/ac motherboard is the world's first Intel 8 Series motherboard to pass the Intel Thunderbolt certification. These Thunderbolt ports will come on ASRock's Z87 Extreme9/ac, which are allegedly arriving to the market very soon, along with dozens of other exciting new features, such as ASRock's A-Style.

We expect to see the Z87 Extreme9/ac at Computex during the first part of June. It, along with Intel's Haswell CPU's, should be one of the main highlights of the show.

We're seeing more and more details from motherboard manufacturers and their upcoming Haswell-capable motherboards, with ASRock walking into the spotlight today with a bunch of details on their entire Z87 lineup of motherboards.

ASRock will be releasing 11 motherboards in the Haswell range, with top three of these boards featuring the Z87 Express chipset: the Z87 Extreme11, Z87 Fatal1ty Professional and Z87 OC Formula. The Z87 Extreme11 is available in the /ac option, which is on-board 802.11ac Wi-Fi for some seriously high-end wireless networking. This is ASRock's best board, and features everything you'd need - Thunderbolt, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, SLI/CrossFire compatibility, and more.

There are a few other boards in this series: the Z87 Extreme 9(/ac), Z87 Extreme6(/ac), Z87 Extreme 4, and the micro-ATX Z87M Extreme4.

PC & Tech Authority have just posted a bunch of pictures of their exclusive look at Gigabyte's Z87X-UD3H motherboard, and boy does it look good. The Haswell-capable board features a slick color scheme consisting of black, grey and blue.

The Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H comes with three full-sized x16 PCIe slots, three x1 PCIe slots, and still, a PCI slot. There's eight SATA ports, 4 DIMM slots, on-board power/reset/CMOS clear buttons, and a SATA power connection that will give the motherboard more power if needed. Gone are the usual molex connectors for some more power, thankfully.

We should know more about this board in the coming weeks leading up to Computex in Taipei.

We had a very nice look at Gigabyte's Z87 G1-Killer motherboard yesterday and now we get to have a glimpse at their UEFI DualBIOS, which is looking absolutely gorgeous. It features the orange and black theme that we know and love from Gigabyte's high-end boards, which looks amazing.

There seems to be something I think Gigabyte should patent here, something along the lines of 'everything but the kitchen sink' when it comes to BIOS options. The new UEFI DualBIOS looks incredibly detailed, and should cater perfectly to enthusiasts and power users. I can't wait to get my hands on a few of these bad boys.

Gigabyte have pushed out a bunch of teaser images on their upcoming Haswell-capable Z87 G1-Killer motherboard. Gigabyte's G1 Killer series is the company's top-tier motherboard, which offers some high-end on-board solutions from companies like Creative and Bigfoot Networks.

What makes this tease very interesting is that the Z87 G1-Killer sports an internal liquid cooling solution, something that has been featured on ASUS' Maximus V Formula. Gigabyte's solution offers both air cooling through the heatsink and liquid cooling through an internally built water channel which transfers the coolant through all-copper made heatpipes. Gigabyte will be offering the board some serious Ultra Durable components, such as IR3550 PowIRstage, 2X Copper PCB, High Capacity Ferrite Core Chokes and more.

Gigabyte's Z87 G1-Killer includes 8 VRM phases on one side of the board, and if we're lucky, we could see 8 more VRMs on the other side of the board, providing a total of 16 VRMs. We should expect the Z87 G1-Killer to ship with Intel XMP profile support, pushing DDR3 right up to 3200MHz. This will be on top of the usual slew of crazy overclocking features that this motherboard is set to include.

We haven't even had our hands grace the next-gen CPU that is Haswell yet, but Intel are already talking about their chipset destined for 2014 - Intel's 9-series chipsets.

These chipsets will support Serial ATA Express, which is based on the PCI Express protocol and will pave the way for some seriously high-bandwidth storage devices. Intel's 9-series chipsets will include core-logic sets such as Z97 and H97, and will support SATA Express by default. There will also be an all-new Intel device protection technology with boot guard built into the chipset, enhancing the security against low-level malware attacks on the upcoming next-gen platform.

What can we expect from SATA Express on Intel's 9-series motherboards? Well, we should see a cost-effective means to deliver interface speeds between 8Gb/s and 16Gb/s compared to the 6Gb/s maximum that the SATA III specification allows now. The specification will define new device and motherboard connects that will support both the current SATA devices, and the new SATA Express devices.

If you've been looking to build yourself a NAS (network attached storage) system, then you might want to stop by Giada's new motherboard, the Giada N70E-DR. The motherboard packs an integrated Celeron C1007U processor, which chews on just 17W of power.

The motherboard can handle native RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 with data security protection and some high-performance Intel 82583V gigabit ethernet ports for some great networking speed and reliability. Also included are some smart hardware monitoring and management capabilities, which allows customers to keep a check on the health of their system.

There are six SATA ports, with two of them being of the SATA 3.0 standard. Two USB 3.0 ports are featured on the Giada N70E-DR for some speedy external connectivity. There's one DDR3 DIMM slot, and a PCI-Express x16 port for some speedy graphics if that's what you want your NAS to be capable of.

We've already seen what ASRock are working on, but what about Gigabyte? They haven't been sleeping by the looks of things, with the new Z87 range of motherboards, built for overclockers, being noticed at CeBIT.

The best of the bunch, the GA-Z87X-OC, is built with a full 8 Phase Solid VRM using DRMOS, International Rectifier MOSFETs, which should give some crazy stability when pushing that overclock. The Z87X-OC includes that sexy orange and black design we've come to know and love from Gigabyte, as well as the usual buttons for enthusiasts on the board - BCLCK, Turbo, Gear, Power switches at the side of DIMM slots, Voltage measuring points, Debug LED and a Dual BIOS switch.

We should expect to see more from Gigabyte at Computex in June, where more consumer-ready boards should be unveiled. There's more in the Z87 range from Gigabyte, with the GA-Z87X-UD5H, GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD3H and GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD3H being shown off at Gigabyte's CeBIT 2013 booth.

Yesterday we had a look at a few of ASRock's Haswell-based motherboard offerings, but the pictures weren't too shabby. We're back today with some much better pictures, where we can take a closer look at their upcoming motherboards.

The shots are in perfect detail, of each board - the B85M, H87 Pro4, Z87 Extreme6 and Z87 Pro4-M. We have shots of each, as well as the inputs on the back of each board, let's start with the B85M:

Next up we have the H87 Pro4.