Dino ‘AKA’ Dinos22 from Team.AU Does Some 3DMark Damage

Forgot to post this earlier, but last week Dino, stuck in what can only be described as an epic Groundhog Day time loop, took the 3DMark03 WR three times in a row using the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC motherboard. Not content to stop there, he also took the 3DMark05 WR (on 4x 7970s) and the 3DMark06 WR (also using 4x 7970s) both using the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC. Not sure if he saw his own shadow or not, but congrats on the records Dino!

Edit...(8/29)

Seems Dino is still stuck in that loop. He just upped the 3DMark03 to 292890 and 54927 on the 3DMark06. 

Mike Moen from Intel’s Performance Team talks overclocking!

Hi guys, I wanted to share a video with you produced by OCTV and HWBOT during the recent Computex 2013 tech show in Taiwan. Pieter from HWBOT.ORG, leading enthusiast/overclockers website, did an interview with a really interesting guy that works for Intel. His name is Mike Moen and he’s the lead engineer for high end and enthusiast platforms. In laymen’s terms, a geek supremo that translates what overclockers are about into language platform architects can understand and implement into design.

One thing I found really interesting is when Mike said “we don’t want logic to be the limiter, we want physics to be that natural limiter”. In other words, Intel is always looking out to remove any possible limitation that the platform itself could produce on overclocking and open it up as much as possible so that the limits in overclockers are literally the limits of silicone and what is physically possible with any piece of silicone. He even talks about specific examples of where they’ve affected the change in logic to make sure overclockers are not left out such as PLL override option back in Sandy Bridge days or pushing the new boundaries with memory overclocking on Haswell platform. Very cool stuff, check out the full interview:

 

ROBBO2 from Australia breaks new FM2 SuperPi records in GIGABYTE competition!

GIGABYTE’s “Pi is Returned” is really hitting a stride at the moment with records falling daily it seems. This time it’s Robbo2 from Australia leading the charge.

Australians are never far away when there’s a SuperPi competition somewhere. It’s nice to see a relative newcommer to the world of extreme OC really show off some decent skill and top the charts so far. Robbo managed to set new FM2 category world records in both 1M and 32M SuperPi. I’ve met Robbo2 at a recent OCAU Extreme OC workshop and it’s great to see OCAU guys jumping the hurdle and really giving LN2 a serious go with some decent hardware. Motherboard used was the GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 and an AMD A10-6800K CPU clocked past 7.2GHz (32M SuperPi) and 7.3GHz(for 1M SuperPi).

Awesome stuff there, keep at it!

For those of you that would like to check out this competition you can follow all the action on HWBOT.ORG.

Hi Cookie takes down several i5 4670K world records on GIGABYTE Z87X-OC

Here’s some more overclocking news for you all. Our resident overlocking evangelist Hi Cookie has been busy pushing an Intel Core i5 4670K processor to the max, garnering a bunch of world records in the process. Cookie took down 4670K world records for wPrime 1024M, wPrime 32M, SuperPi 32M, SuperPi 1M, PiFast and overall CPU frequency.

It’s really great to see Cookie pushing the outer limits of performance on an OC board that was largely designed by himself. Congrats Cookie mate.

Check out the scores below.

Check out the scores in more detail on HWBOT here.

More info on our GIGABYTE Z87X-OC board here.

MikeCDM breaks FM2 SuperPi WR in GIGABYTE “Pi is Returned” Contest

GIGABYTE just kicked off a new competition at HWBOT with large cash prizes to see who the best of the best AMD overclockers are in the world today. First score was submitted by MikeCDM right at the start with the FM2 category world record 1M SuperPi and second place 32M Super Pi with a mere 3 seconds (0.004%) away from taking the FM2 32M Superpi world record as well. Mike is running a massive 7.3GHz with GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 sporting the new digital PWM.

Category win earns US$500 with a bonus US$500 for a world record. Looks like FM2 category will be earning some big prizes! Let’s go!

Great score Mike and keep pushing. Awesome to see records fall so far already!

I’ll end this with famous words of everyone’s favourite anchorman, lol!

‘Pi is Returned’: A GIGABYTE OC Contest on HWBOT

Last Friday evening we launched our latest overclocking contest on HWBOT, Pi is Returned. The big news with this contest is that AMD and ourselves have managed to stump up some nice fat cash prizes – over 5 grand in total as well as some pretty attractive hardware prizes too.

The idea is pretty simple: Two AMD platforms – FM2/1 & AM3+ - on two classic benchmarks – Super Pi 1M and Super Pi 32M. Here’s the break down of stages and prizes in more detail:

Group A - FM1/2 (Llano/Trinity/Richland)

Stage1: Super Pi 1M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - FM2A85XN-WIFI & AMD A10-6800K
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 11sec 359ms (full list)

Stage2: Super Pi 32M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - FM2A85XN-WIFI & AMD A10-6800K
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10min 40sec 875ms (full list)

Group B – AM3+ (Bulldozer/Piledriver)

Stage1: Super Pi 1M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - 990FXA-UD3 & AMD FX-8350
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10sec 93ms (full list)

Stage2: Super Pi 32M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - 990FXA-UD3 & AMD FX-8350
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10min 31sec 770ms (full list)

Note: the World record bonus prize of USD $500 will be awarded at the end of the competition to the highest score per stage, if the target record has been broken.

Visit the official Pi is Returned competition page on HWBOT here.

Jeffrey Stephenson creates Flightline PC using a GIGABYTE Thin Mini-ITX board

Just to follow up on Dino’s blog below. Here are some more details. Renowned craftsman and PC builder Jeffrey Stephenson (known to many as SlipperySkip) has now completed his latest creation, Flightline. Inspired by the Wright Brothers Memorial in North Carolina, and sporting a GIGABYTE Thin Mini-ITX board, Flightline is basically a desk ornament that is also a PC. The outer shell is made of quilted maple, maple burl, mahogany, lace wood and aircraft grade birch plywood, i.e. several types of damn good quality wood…

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves…

Despite being really thin, the piece offers a thoroughly decent level of performance, powered by an Intel Core i3-3225 processor on a GIGABYTE H77TN Thin Mini-ITX motherboard with 8GB DDR3 and 60GB mSATA SSD. Not too shabby…

Check out this article on BoingBoing, plus the full monty on Jeffrey’s website slipperyskip.com

More info about the GIGABYTE H77TN here.

Custom PC to rule them all!

We often catch glimpse of some amazing works of art by custom PC builders and I am always in such state of amazement what creativity and dedication people show to “prettyfy” their PCs. So a mate of mine tells me about this amazing custom build by a bloke on OCAU (Overclockers Australia) forum calling himself “slipperyskip” and what a build this was. I won’t spoil the full build so I’ll put up a couple of photos but for the full worklog click on this forum thread address and keep scrolling down!

Stunning!

TeamAU take global 3DMARK03 world record!

I had a bit of a play with my favourite new toy (GIGABYTE Z87X-OC) running Intel 4770K and tripple crossfire 7970 and nailed the global 3DMARK03 world record tonight. Haswell is exceptionally fast clock for clock. It easily beats Ivy Bridge in benchmarks like 3D03 with up to 10% lower frequency.

Check out TeamAU Facebook page or OCAU forum for more details.

dinos22

Anandtech interview Jackson Hsu, Motherboard Product Management Director at GIGABYTE

A couple of weeks ago Anandtech’s chief motherboard reviewer Ian Cutress had the opportunity to get face to face with one of the most important men in our office, Mr Jackson Hsu – motherboard product management director here at GIGABYTE.

Taking a pretty relaxed and open approach to the questions Ian posed, Jackson’s interview offers what is in many respects, a fly-on-the-wall view of just how much hard work, communication and sheer endeavor goes into designing, manufacturing and marketing our motherboards. A pretty interesting piece I hope you all enjoy.

Anandtech.com

TweakTown investigate the power delivery of the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force

With the Ultra Durable™ 5 last year GIGABYTE introduced our new power design using Powerstage controllers and ICs from IR, debuting on our boards like the Z77X-UP7. The clear advantage of using these components was efficiency and good thermals. Simply put they get power to the CPU and memory without producing too much heat, even when you ramp them up and push the performance to the limit.

But it can a tad frustrating for a marketing guy when you try and actually get solid proof of these claims, especially as the vast majority of motherboard reviewers tend to focus on features, price and general performance. To be fair, few reviewers actually have the means to explore heat dissipation and efficiency.

Which was why it’s really great to see Chris Ramsayer of TweakTown dusting off his thermal imaging camera and taking a good hard look at the PWM of our Z87X-OC Force motherboard, one our new Ultra Durable™ 5 Plus boards launched a few months ago. Here’s sample of what he had to say, plus some fascinating images:

“At this point in the test, I'm under the impression that GIGABYTE's new PWM cooler is amazing. With temps like the set we ran we needed to find out what happens when we take the heat sink off.

In the image above, we removed the PWM heat sink and stressed the CPU with performance benchmarks running in a loop. Surprisingly, the warmest IR3550 only reached 45C and a majority of the digital PWM chips hovered right around 40C with am ambient room temperature of 20C.”

Here’s a video Chris shot. Chris explains:

“In the video embedded above, we see the system with and without the heat sink installed. In both cases, we used a timeline for testing with Cinebench 11.5 with the computer shut down and at room temperature to start with. Cinebench starts for the first time at 1 minute and 20 seconds. A new Cinebench CPU run starts every 1 minute and 10 seconds after so at 2 min 30 sec, 3 min 40 sec, 4 min 50 sec and finally at the 6 minute mark. Most of the PWMs reach 40C, but nothing goes over 45C.”

 

Check out the full article on TweakTown here.

 

More info on the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force can be found here.

Dino talks high-end audio at PAX Australia 2013

Just came across this video from PAX Australia a few weeks ago where our man in Aus, Dino, fields some interesting questions about our new 8 series boards from a young fella from JTLProductions, a gaming channel covering the show. Interesting to see that journalists are looking younger than ever, yet actually having the brains to ask pretty well thought-out questions.

 

You can find more info on our G-Killer gaming series of motherboards here.

GIGABYTE Question Time on Facebook: Form Factor Poll Results

Last week, in an attempt to better understand our Facebook followers and the systems they are building/using, we asked you to tell us which form factor motherboard you have installed in your current rig. The options were E-ATX, Standard ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX. Check out the results below:

It probably surprises nobody that standard ATX motherboards are the most popular choice. This totally makes sense. At GIGABYTE we offer more models in this form factor than any other, with the majority of our mainstream and upper mainstream product offerings coming in ATX. So no surprises that 62% of you are using a standard ATX form factor motherboard. For record, I also belong in this group.

So what about the larger E-ATX form factor? According to our poll, this form factor accounts for 9% of you. This is actually a little higher than I would have guessed, except perhaps when you take into account the audience being asked. Of course, our Motherboard Facebook page fans shouldn’t be taken as an accurate sample of your average user, because clearly if you are following us you have a strong interest in PC building, motherboard etc. So sure, this would make you more likely to go for a larger, enthusiast motherboard such as our G1.Sniper 5 or Z87X-OC Force, two of our most recent E-ATX model offerings. So, yeah, plenty of enthusiast level systems out there, being built by enthusiasts. 10% in total.

Then we come to the smaller end of things, which for me is perhaps the most interesting. The PC business has been evolving slowly over the last decade with technology getting more and more efficient, using less power generally so one obvious trend that is the rise of smaller system builds based on small form factor motherboards.

Micro-ATX in fact has a great deal of flexibility in terms of size, with plenty of variation available. But the one main difference is that you’re getting fewer add-in-card options with fewer PCIe and PCI slots than standard ATX implementations. Micro-ATX also tends to be mostly mainstream board offerings, less extreme configurations, so to see only 19% of participants using this form factor kind of tells me that our Facebook followers are more inclined towards the upper tier models, which echoes what we’ve seen so far.

Mini-ITX is a relatively new form factor, defined not by Intel like the other form factors, but by VIA Technologies – hence the ITX, not the ATX suffix. With fixed dimensions of 17cm by 17cm, recent years have seen the form factor mature considerably with more and more chassis available than previously. But despite the relative maturity of Mini-ITX I am still a little surprised to see 10% of those  polled using it. This is a significant chunk and points to growth in this segment. It also ties in with GIGABYTE now offering more in this form factor than before. One example is our recent F285XN-WIFI board which see the AMD FM2 platform on Mini-ITX for the first time. Then again, one could also conclude that if you are a Mini-ITX user then you may also find polls about form factors to be quite interesting…. ;)

One other interesting point is the little nugget of data that tells about the gender of all those polled. According to our Facebook Poll App 96% of you are male, 2% female with 2% not sure. So it seems that our Facebook fan page is a bit of a boys club. Are we really so surprised?