Gigabyte Gaming Motherboards OC Force, Ultra Durable Series - Computex 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,273 words · ~6 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our
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trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner
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is nc.com guys we're here in the Gigabyte
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component Suite where they've got all their new Wares on display we have a
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wall of motherboards here unfortunately we're not going to be able to talk about
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the exact details of all of them but this is something that had my attention
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drawn to it this is a computex dni award so that's a design and Innovation award
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arranged by is which is basically a third party saying yes the design is
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good the Innovation is good and if it's anything like the tradition we've seen
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before with Gigabyte it's probably true so they're continuing with their Ultra
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durable design so this is ultra durable 5 plus but we're going to focus on what
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separates the different lines because right now there is differentiation
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between their gaming boards so this particular gaming board this is the G1
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sniper 5 has a completely upgraded
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cooling design so it's air cooling for the mosfets here or liquid cooling for
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the mosfet simply by plugging three 8 in hoses into this and you can use this
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with something like a DIY all-in-one cooler such as The Cooler Master Iceberg
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for example or you can build it into your completely custom Loop you've got
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some of those onboard overclocking features things like a post LED readout
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um yeah you know onboard power button so
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not quite to the same extent as an overclocking Centric board you've got
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full support for four-way graphics card configurations whether it's in crossfire
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or SLI but this is where it really can into its own as what makes it gaming
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optimized it's got a killer Nick built in and check this out they have
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completely upgraded their onboard audio solution Gigabyte actually pioneered the
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whole putting better onboard audio on motherboards for crying out loud thing
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with their G Series that was the first time we saw it where someone actually
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went yeah we're going to we're going to like actually do this in a way that's meaningful and check this out they're
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upping the anti again with swappable opamps so on all of the G1 series
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refresh boards check that out swappable opamps on the matx version swappable
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opamps on the b85 version and then
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swappable opamps even on the AMD version so there's now a G1 sniper a85 X now I
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want to talk about this one for a moment because I kind of raised an eyebrow when
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they told me b85 chipset gaming board I went well what do you mean gaming board
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G8 b85 chipset you can't even overclock and they said you know what not all over
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not not all Gamers overclock some Gamers want a better land solution built into
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their board and a better audio solution built into their board and they don't want to overclock and okay fine I get
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okay fair enough save some money don't overclock get better audio and better
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land solution and swappable op amps very nice now let's move on to the
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overclocking board so this is a very similar air SL liquid Extreme heatsink
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Design it's also got an an active fan as
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well as liquid cooling barbs but check this out this is where the over clocking
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Heritage really comes in compared to gaming so rather than having a fancy
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audio solution and onboard killer networking this one has all the onboard
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buttons you could want all the onboard voltage readouts you could want post LED
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readout uh oh cool you can turn the PCI Express Lanes on and off this is
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extremely handy for benchmarking because you don't want to be ripping things on
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and off all the time and check check this out actually okay hold on so
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four-way graphics card support so that's in crossfire or SLI but let's move on to
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the next one so that's the force that's a flagship board now we've got the z87x
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OC check this out this is the kind of thing that someone like me who tests on
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an open platform all the time would love to see built-in front USB ports that you
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don't have to reach around the back of the board to get access to so this one
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is more of the barebones nothing extra purest overclocking board whereas the
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force is more of a generally Flagship board in general moving on we've got the
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ultra durable Series so this one right here again you find features that aren't
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necessarily relevant to Gamers or to overclockers things like Thunderbolt but
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this is also a very high-end board in its own right you're going to to be able
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to run four-way Crossfire four-way SLI you've got all of those built-in
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overclocking features all that cool stuff but just to not quite the same
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sort of degree of optimization for these particular uses that the other two
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boards are now let's move all the way down over to the very end here where
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we've got ah this guy right here Z87 and Wi-Fi
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so there's a Z87 mitx board this is performance optimized you're going to be
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able to overclock on it which is very very cool but right over here they've
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asked me to specific draw attention to this board there's now an fm2 ITX board
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from Gigabyte and what's cool about this one is it's using the same voltage
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delivery components as you find on the OC class boards this board under liquid
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nitrogen has actually been up to what did what did they say 5.8 GHz or
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something ridiculous like that with an fm2 CPU so very very cool stuff let's
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move on to graphics cards correction that was 6.7 GHz overclock on this
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particular board using liquid nitrogen also it supports AMD's wire wireless
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display and maybe we shouldn't move on to graphics cards just yet because
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there's a couple cool things over here that they have on display in the suite
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so this is related to the overclocking board as well as the gaming board so
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they've got a blown up version of all the overclocking buttons and pretty much
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everything you can do with them everything from uh debug display to CPU
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ratio up and down to changing your multiplier up and down so you can switch
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to single BIOS mode dual BIOS mode dip switch all this stuff is built right
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into the board and this is kind of a cool button you can press this button
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but I don't think it actually does anything but don't worry on the motherboard it will and then this one
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right here they're showing off what makes the gaming boards gaming so that's
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the upgradeable opamp which we talked about before already oh check that out
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that's hilarious love it um as well as
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the dedicated audio Zone on the PCB but we've been seeing this for a while from
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Gigabyte and then here they have a pretty cool demo of the uh of the liquid
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cooling hybrid Solution that's uh that you can hook up on these boards s