Displaying items by tag: SATA 3.0

With all of the excitement surround a CPU launch from both AMD and then Intel some of the smaller products have been overlooked. These are parts like the A75 chipset and the Llano CPU. We have had one of these up on the test bench for a while now. Mostly to run the performance tests and see where this hardware falls in terms of real performance, but also to try it out and see just what it is like to use.  After all this is a platform that AMD was putting a good deal of stock in for future sales and market share. We wanted to see what it would be like to actually use one. We have already taken a look at the design philosophy and features So without any further preamble we bring you the second half of our Gigabyte A75-UD4H motherboard review.

Ok, we have taken a look at the MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 and its design, and features. We uncovered a few things that gave us some concern. Will the board be able to handle being loaded up with cards or other devices? How will the relatively small number of PCIe lanes behave if we give them too much to think about at once? Well we are going to find that out as well as see how far we can push this board and our Core i7 2600k CPU. Let’s pick up where we left off and dive into the BIOS before we move onto the performance numbers.

The term Big Bang is used by many scientists to describe the moment of creation. They say that before this event the universe was a chaotic mass of gasses and unformed matter. The gravity and heat combined to compress this to a critical mass. At that critical point all of that gas and unformed matter exploded in all directions to form the basis or the universe we know. MSI’s Big Bang is a culmination of ideas, components and design choices that have, well not really exploded but, hit the market in a fairly big way. Before the launch of this line up MSI was having a rough time in the market. However, even then we saw the hints of big things on the horizon. MSI had partnered up with Lucid; they had begun tinkering with new components for their motherboards and their video cards. We have seen what they can do with the X58, P55 and even the 8xx chipsets from AMD. Now let’s take a look at what they do with the P67 chipset in their Big Bang Marshal.