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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Friday, August 29, 2008
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Today's motherboard is a full-size solution (which already makes it attractive for universal PC builders) featuring two graphics slots as well as an integrated graphics core that supports CrossFire and Hybrid CrossFire modes.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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Its always refreshing when a manufacturer brings something different to the table and tries to raise the bar of the current gold standard. With each new model, motherboard makers have been doing their best to one up each other as onboard reset / power / clear CMOS buttons, fault displays, LEDs and integrated water cooling have all found their place among high end mobos. Gigabyte has another trick up its sleeve with their new EP45-Extreme motherboard that features 1600 FSB, Crossfire support, holds up to 16GB of DDR2-1200 and the most radical chipset cooling ever made. Leave it up to HardwareLogic to find out if this "Extreme" motherboard can live up to its name.
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Monday, August 25, 2008
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Beyond a few small snags the Gigabyte EP45 has some very nice features and is widely available online. Gigabyte has released a full slate of P45 motherboards including the EP45-DQ6, the EP45-DS4, the EP45-DS5 and more. Across the board performance was ok, and as expected from a P45 chipset motherboard, with performance equal mostly within the separate run parameters of other motherboards in this caliber. The Gigabyte EP45-DS4R is a good solid motherboard just not anything too over the top or really that far apart from other P45 boards we have seen...
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Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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The DS3R was designed as an inexpensive essentials board and it exceeds its quota. While we cannot recommend the board for Multi-GPU purposes that doesn't mean you can't use a good single card or a GX2/X2 or the second slot for another Nvidia card for PhysX. Like any P45 if you can tweak the nuts off it the performance is exceptionally good - and the Gigabyte has plenty of options that work (!!) to do this.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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There's two perspectives in the video card market today that of price/performance and pure performance no matter what the cost. The Gigabyte GeForce 9600GT TurboForce 1GB card shines in a couple of areas where the AA and AF is turned on with high resolutions and it runs really cool due to the cooling solutions on other 9600GT cards. The card also runs cool compared to the other 9600GT cards on the market. The problem with the Gigabyte card is the competition in the form of the 4850 and GeForce 9800GTX cards which are both online at the same $170 price point at this moment, meaning it is not a compelling buy at this point until pricing goes down. At the moment though, both cards outperform the 9600 card.
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Intel's P45 Chipset was released this summer along with the P43, G43, and G45 Chipsets as the mainstream Eaglelake alternative to Intel's current flagship X48 Chipset. Though over the older X48 motherboards, the P45 has the advantages of using Intel's newer ICH10 / ICH10R Southbridge and support for up to 16GB of DDR2/DDR3 memory, which is double that of what's supported by the X48. Today we are looking at two Intel P45 motherboards compliments of Gigabyte with their EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R. The EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R are just two of Gigabyte's motherboards bearing the P45 Chipset but in total they have eight different motherboards using this version of the Eaglelake Chipset.
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Monday, August 18, 2008
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Today, I will be looking at the EP45-DS3L, Gigabyte's economy-priced P45 motherboard. This is probably the least expensive newly released motherboard I have seen coming from either of the top two motherboard manufacturers in a very long time, and obviously marketed towards those buyers looking at buying boards from ECS, ASRock, or one of the other manufacturers that build budget motherboards. Will the EP45-DS3L meet the high standards that we have come to expect from a Gigabyte motherboard, with features found on its bigger brothers? Read on to see!
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We're writing to let you all know that we have just posted a new article at HotHardware in which we evaluate the features and performance of four P45-based motherboards from Gigabyte. We?ve got both their high-end and low-end DDR3 based P45 boards, along with their high-end and low-end DDR2 boards. This will provide us with a clear and concise overview of what type of performance and features you can expect at difference price points. We?ve got a lot of questions to answer, such as finding out the performance differences between DDR2 and DDR3 P45 platforms, how features like copper heatpipe cooling and twelve phase power help overclocking, and how power consumption differs between high-end, ultra-packed motherboards compared to trimmed down, minimalist boards. On the low-end, we have Gigabyte?s EP45-DS3L for DDR2 based systems along with the EP45T-DS3R for DDR3 based systems. On the high-end, we have the much more exciting EP45-DQ6 platform for DDR2 based systems, and for the high-end DDR3 landscape, we have the cr?me de le cr?me of Gigabyte?s P45 lineup, the EP45T-Extreme. Come on by the site and check them out...
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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Can Gigabytes entry level motherboard keep pace with the cream of P45 releases we have reviewed recently? We test the EP45-DS3P to find out.
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Like the GTX 280 which has dropped in price over the last few weeks, the GTX 260 has followed suit. Whether you're a fan of ATI or not, the release of the HD 4800 series and their performance to price ratio has forced NVIDIA to cut margins on the new GTX line-up of cards and give us an extremely powerful card for what now resembles a fair price. To date we've only had a look at one GTX 260 which came with a massive out of the box overclock. What this means is it hasn't really given us the ability to completely come to terms with what the GTX 260 offers in its cheapest form; the stock form.
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Monday, August 11, 2008
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The HD 4850 is the card that has put AMD/ATI back on the graphics card map over the past month. While the HD 3850 and HD 3870 were both good cards, a constant line-up of NVIDIA cards along with price drops meant that the aging technology was having trouble keeping up with cards not only in a similar price bracket, but cheaper again. The latest HD 4850 to come into the labs is from GIGABYTE and before we get stuck into the performance side of things, we will have a look at the package and what's inside as well as the card itself. So, let's not ramble on anymore and just get stuck into it.
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The midrange to high end motherboard market is filled with products. These 'high-midrange' boards are very popular among enthusiasts for its abundance of features, performance, and a not-too-out-of-the-world price tags. Sure, boards like the Asus Striker II NSE are really good, but not everyone can justify all the extra fancy features for the price. As major motherboard companies love to compete in this area, a significant array of boards are made based on the collection of latest chipsets -- for example, both Gigabyte and Asus have a ton of Intel P45 chipset based motherboards ranging from just over $100 all the way to over $250. Today, we'll take a look at Gigabyte's high end P45 board -- the Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 -- as the name suggests, it has Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver, 100% solid state capacitors, and "Quad Bios, Quad Cooling, Quad E-SATA2, Quad Triple Phase, Quad-Core Optimized, Quad DDR2 Slots". We've already taken a look at the quad-quad-quad-quad-quad-quad Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 a few months back. The Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 is loaded with features and carrying a $250 price tag at press time, so let's see how this beast steps up against the competition.
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The first chipset to come out in the 7 series was the 780G, the first with the next generation in onboard graphics along with HT3 support for the Phenom processors. AMD really outdid themselves; not only was it future proof, it finally introduced a good onboard graphics accelerator. GIGABYTE has been one of the biggest producers of motherboards along with ASUS and MSI. And one thing is for certain with these three companies; above all else, if the chipset is good, you will find at least one board based on it. Today we are looking at the GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard. How does it stack up as a HTPC board? Let's have a good look.
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The battle for your netbook dollar has just gotten one notch higher with the introduction of the Gigabyte M912, a Vista-based touchscreen machine that's all ready for touching.
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Gigabyte tends to release many motherboards on the same chipset and the X48 is no exception with no less than four X48 motherboards currently on their website. The X48T-DQ6 supports all of the latest Intel Core 2 Quad/Extreme/Duo CPUs and also supports the older Prescott CPUs which some motherboards don't due to the VRM 11.1 specification. The qualified memory support on the board is rather light as to their Qualified Vendor List on their website, with the lack of Samsung DDR3 memory above 1066MHz and no Crucial memory support on the QVL list at all though both companies' memory worked great when I tried them. Not exactly an Editor's Choice due to its lack of DDR3 support, but it is a Hot Product as it still has plenty of available options that make it worth taking a look at.
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