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Displaying items by tag: Overclocking

01AMD is a company that not too long ago was on top. They had done something that no one thought possible; they were able to outperform Intel clock for clock.  But they had a problem; they had a winning CPU but had to rely on others for a solid platform to run on. This prompted AMD to buy ATi (one of the companies that had a good chipset for AMD) which gave them a GPU business and a chipset business. The problem has been paying the bill on that particular purchase. This has prevented them from putting a lot of money into R&D and has also led to some, well unimpressive products (on the CPU side not the GPU). We have worked through several CPUs and chipsets; each one improving a little over the other but never really catching up to what Intel has on the market.  Now things could be different; nVidia has allowed SLI on an AMD chipset and AMD is making good strides in terms of what their chipsets can do (with limitations from the CPU and IMC). We have their latest chipset in the form of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5. This is a Three-Way SLI AMD motherboard with lots to offer. We are going to look at the design, layout, and cover some design philosophy and features along the way.

Wednesday, 20 July 2011 23:35

Asus Sabertooth P67 B3 Performance Review

15We have told you about Asus’ design choices for the Sabertooth P67 and even gone into some detail about the mindset behind this and other products in the TUF line. However all of the best design choices and components in the world will not make a board perform. To get great performance takes a little more. In this half of our Sabertooth review we are going to look into that side of the product. Asus has always had a reputation for tinkering with their BIOSes (not always a good one though).  So let’s start off there and see where it takes us.

Published in Pro Motherboards
Sunday, 26 June 2011 19:25

MSI's Z68A-GD80 Design and Feature Preview

 

 

Board01At the request of some of our readers we are going to start splitting up the way we do our reviews. However, instead of the normal “unboxings” that we find out on the Internet we are going to break up our normal review into two distinct parts. There will be the first part that will cover design choices, board layout, and features. This will be followed up with our normal performance section. We feel that this will give everyone the pieces and parts they are looking for. You can still read both (they will be crosslinked) and also discuss them on our new forum, but this way we can cover things quicker and in a more complete fashion without making each review too long. For our first dive into this new style we have the MSI Z68A-GD80B3 up on the test bench and behind the camera lens.  This board follows the same trend as most of MIS’s recent product, but now they are into their second generation; you get Military Class II and OC Genie II.  So let’s dive into the more theoretical part of our review and take a look at the packaging, board layout and the features for the MSI Z68A-GD80B3.

 

 

01Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU.  I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).

Monday, 04 April 2011 19:43

Asus EAH6950 Voltage Tweak Edition Give Away

 

 

02Ok so here is the deal. Asus has sent us a couple of GPUs. One an EAH6870 Direct CU is for review and testing. The other an  EAH6950 Voltage Tweak Edition is for us to give away to one of our readers. We thought we would make this interesting. To do this we have come up with a nice interactive way to give this away. We will be publishing our review of the 6870 very soon and this card is designed to be overclocked as is the 6950 so we thought we would see if you guys and girls can guess just how fast we can get the 6870 and still finish all of our testing.


To find out what we use to test you can take a look at our review of the Asus 5870 Stalker COP Edition. Once you have the overclock in your head (for Core, Memory and Voltage used) send it along to our This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The first person (based on the subission times) who is the closest (and is inside the US or Canada) to the actual overclock wins the Asus EAH6950 Voltage Tweak.

We will be publishing our review in on April 13th so you have till then to get in your guess. Make sure the e-mail address is valid as that is how I will be contacting you. Good Luck!

01



**I do not an will never sell, redistrinute, give away or spam ANY e-mail address used for this contest, to register for the site or any other that I may have... It is just in poor taste to do that**

Published in News



01The Gigabyte Open Overclocking Competition North American Finals for 2010 has come to a close. All the LN2 is gone, the press and contestants have all gotten home by now and the rooms at the Pacific Palms resort are all cleaned up. The top three overclockers for the event were sno.lcn, mikeguava and Ross. All three were awarded prizes but only sno.lcn and mikeguava will be flying out to Taipei for the world championship.

Published in News
Saturday, 07 August 2010 11:24

GOOC 2010 kicks off today



hallIn a little less than an hour we will be looking in as a handful of overclockers compete to win a ticket to Taipei for a chance at being the World’s best overclocker (at least inside the Gigabyte hosted tournament).

Published in News

 

 

Card01With all the hoopla over the GTX 460 going on we are taking the time to look at a GPU that is not really new, but is still worthy of some headlines. Although the AMD Radeon HD5870 is fast approaching its first birthday it is no surprise that it is still a big seller. But we wondered if it is the reference GPUs that are making the 5870 fly off the shelves or if it is products like the Asus EAH5870 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat edition (which we will just call Stalker COP moving forward) This is Asus’ V2 HD5870 with a voltage tweak option for great overclocking potential. As you might have guessed the box also contains the Stalker COP game as part of the bundle. So let’s try out this bundle and see if it is worth the $500 or so you will shell out for it.

 

Published in Enthusiast GPUs
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