Motherboards - Page 31

While PCI-E 2.0 has been more than kind enough to us since its inception in early 2007 with its gobs of available bandwidth on tap, looking over 4 years beyond and now PCI-E 3.0 is becoming the talk of the town.

While it's been said that current gen high-end video cards can be used to their maximum potential on existing PCI-E 2.0/.1 equipped boards, PCI-E 3.0 gives far more headroom for future super bandwidth hungry graphics cards inevitably to come, boasting a bit rate that effectively "doubles" PCI-E 2.0 at 8GT/s.

On that note, it's been rumoured that the benefits of PCI-E 3.0 could be utilized for some folks straight off the bat, providing you are lucky enough to have one of those super duper PCI-E based SSD solutions, such as one of these monsters from OCZ.

Alongside the likes of ASUS, MSI and ECS, ASRock have also launched their first Llano optimized A75 chipset motherboards ahead of the official APU launch in just a few days.

The particular boards ASRock have first let out the gate include their top-of-the-line option in the A75 Extreme6, as well as the A75 Pro4 (also a full ATX sized board) and three mATX boards in the A75 Pro4-M, A75M and A75M-HVS.

All boards of course carry support for FM1 APUs, have two or four DDR3-1866 RAM slots, and between five and eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports depending on the board. All boards carry four USB 3.0 ports (boasting ASRock's XFast USB technology) with the exception of the Extreme6 which has six ports. Both D-Sub and HDMI outputs are resident on all models.

ASUS have today announced the launch of the AMD A75 chipset-based F1A75 Series motherboards. The F1A75 Series are specifically designed to optimize performance for the AMD Llano APUs, the F1A75 Series boards also sport overclocking capabilities for the APU with a variety of integrated graphics built directly into the same die.

The new series is also sporting the latest ASUS-exclusive technologies and features such as Dual Intelligent Processors 2 (DIP2) with DIGI+ VRM for precise power control, a graphical and mouse-controlled UEFI BIOS and easy-to-use auto tuning for better performance.

The first board to be pimped with the new APU-powered chips is the ASUS F1A75-V EVO which is the world's first FM1 socket motherboard with dual x8/x8 PCI-Express for AMD CrossFireX support, it also includes USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps and it's also worth pointing out that the entire ASUS F1A75 range includes native support for both USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps.

Earlier on today here in Taipei we managed to cross paths with upcoming hardware from AMD and GIGABYTE. It is a good look at the hard work AMD has put into it Fusion APU technology and what GIGABYTE has done to seat it.

Specifically we met the upcoming GA-A75M-UD2H micro-ATX motherboard from GIGABYTE, which is based on the AMD A75 chipset with support for AMD Llano APU processors, using the FM1 socket configuration.

You may have seen this type of configuration before, but not like how you are going to see in the video above. We managed to overclock the AMD CPU from its default clock speed of 2.9GHz all the way up to 3.6GHz (150 x 24) using an FSB of 150MHz. In turn this also overclocked the DX11 Radeon HD GPU within the AMD APU from a core clock speed of 600MHz to 900MHz. This is really impressive and we even saw Crysis 2 running at 720p at around 40 - 45 frames per second and from a system without a video card (strange to look at, actually), that is rather good.

ASUS are really going for gold with the AM3+ platform by including the Republic of Gamers (ROG) teaming of two motherboards in the form of the ASUS Crosshair V Formula and The Ultimate Force (TUF) Sabertooth 9900FX which go hand-in-hand with AMD's 990FX chipset that is designed to run up to four discrete graphics cards. ASUS are keeping the color scheme in line with other TUF-series boards and it doesn't look too bad at all.

We all know hacking is a fact of life, be it for good or bad. However, I don't think the topic of this news relates all that much to hacking.

Colin Brix is a manager at GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei and someone I have worked with as a contact for product samples and tech questions for many years. From the information we have seen so far, he seems to be the victim of a fairly serious prank today and one that the Taiwanese motherboard maker is taking very seriously.

A website by the name of Rumor Pedia claimed to be have sent a screenshot by someone named Kirllos who managed to 'infiltrate' GIGABYTE's internal work network using "mega-d botnet". Mind you, this bot was disabled by security company FireEye back on November 6, 2009, according to sources on Wikipedia. This screenshot is filled with a vast amount of inconsistencies relating to 'leaked' details about an upcoming processor from AMD. It also showed benchmarks using popular tests such as Super PI and others. This type of leak by a company employee tends to have very serious consequences, as you can imagine.

Gigabyte have today released a video showing off their new Touch BIOS, it's innovative and user-friendly and available on all Gigabyte Z68-based motherboards. The BIOS has not really changed much in the past few, oh I don't know, decades... but there are a few companies with different takes on what they think the BIOS should be (or at least, how it should look and feel). Gigabyte have taken a path that brings familiarity to the concept in the form of an icon-based user experience. Take a look at the below video and see what you think.

Man, can we get anymore anagrams in that headline?

Andrew Burnes of Geforce announced today that they will once again be providing AMD motherboards that support SLI. Kick-ass, Andrew. Hit the jump for a photo of one of these shiny new toys, and to check out the rest of the press release.

Earlier on today we visited the GIGABYTE headquarters in Taipei and had a good old fashioned full look at its newest motherboard that will be officially launched next week at CeBIT in Germany. We are talking about the X58A-OC aka Hi Cookie's baby.

Intel's revised Sandy Bridge-based motherboards are looking to arrive in the first week of March, everyone is calling them B3. While CeBIT is cranking along in the first week of March, press and customer samples of B3 revision boards will be making their way around the world.

A new video has just been posted to YouTube which shows off the upcoming GIGABYTE X58A-OC, a motherboard dedicated solely to overclocking. It has many unnecessary features stripped from the board creating a platform that is ideal for ultra high clock speeds.

Intel's Sandy Bridge chip problem is causing quite the kerfuffle. Working in retail selling these boards everyday is going to be hard for the next few months. What do you tell customers? As a retailer we're having to explain a huge issue which is daunting to a new customer coming in off the street, however most manufacturers are stepping up to the plate with some great service.

Earlier on today ASRock and Fatal1ty held a joint launch event in Taipei at the at Y17 Taipei Youth Center to officially launch their relationship as well as the P67 Professional gaming motherboard to local press.

Intel has been quite busy this month with the launch of the LGA1155 socket - but this has not slowed down news floating around the web of the LGA1366-successor, LGA2011.