Gigabyte's 8-Series Haswell Motherboard Tour [video]
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2013 10:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Haswell
Today is all about Haswell and Gigabyte is kicking things off with a video tour of some of their Haswell motherboard lineup. Colin from Gigabyte stopped by a couple of weeks back to show off some of the latest innovations implemented in Gigabyte's line of 8-series motherboards.
With Haswell the name of the game from the motherboard makers is really polish. With the exception of FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), the 8-series platform is very similar to those that came before it. This gave the motherboard makers time and encouragement to focus on improving user experience as much as possible. As a result we saw tons of attention paid to improving things like UEFI, software utilities and ease of use. Check out the video below to see what Gigabyte did this round.
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chizow - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
I did not see the UD4 in the video, picked it up today from MC, sweet board!Sabresiberian - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
It looks like mainboard manufacturers are putting better sound solutions on the MBs, but I still would rather use a discreet card, or as some of the posters here suggest, connect through my video card to a decent receiver. I'm skeptical that the second is a great solution in the we have to depend on Nvidia or AMD to write good sound drivers, but if I can get the performance I would like from the video card sound processing (or pass-through), it makes the expense of added sound solutions on MBs doubly useless to me.waldojim42 - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
And again I feel like the only person who could care less about the analog audio.Here is a hint Gigabyte; Many of us rocking surround sound, have digital receivers. We don't need gold plated connections, upgradable op-amps, or Creative. We need Dolby Digital Live, and DTS Connect. A single fiber jack will do the rest.
JonnyDough - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
My comments:I love ITX. Can't wait to rock LAN parties with such a tiny box. What I want to see on ITX boards:
High quality audio. Single gigabit NIC is fine. 4 USB ports is fine too, I still have no use for USB3.0. Overclocking is pointless to me considering the power in today's CPUs, but it's a fine feature for those who want it. It was fun and made sense on Athlon, but today it doesn't really get me much more performance.
Longevity is great, considering that I won't be upgrading nearly as often (I made the jump from Opteron 185 OC'd - equal to a low end Core 2 Duo up to a Core i5 IVB and never really missed much). I'd love to start seeing seven year warranties. For a high quality ITX board with a great warranty I would spend $200. For a typical ATX board I won't spend more than around $100.
It's good to see things like PS/2 ports finally being dropped off motherboards more and more. Those are so archaic they have cavemen laughing. The orange and neon green are fine, but obviously won't meet everyone's tastes. What we need are options. Make PCI-E and memory headers customizable/swappable. It's one more thing to sell us, and it gives us options. Try adding a bit of LED accent lighting to the board, just to give it a cool factor. Let users push a button to switch between colors. :)
Jaaap - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
This video is great. Real cool dude from Gigabyte that actually knows stuff.hobobaba - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Thanks Anand for a video review. Please post all your reviews in videos. I feel most of us come to your site to know ( but don't know why we need to know).IceStorm - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link
I tried a G1.Sniper 5 with an i7 4770 as the base for Tri-SLI GTX Titan system. The board had a bent back corner where the back plate cluster was such that the PS2 and USB ports didn't fit properly up against the I/O plate. A brand new Windows 7 install BSODed every time Steam tried to update.This was all less than a week after I tried a G1.Sniper 3 with an existing i7 3770K. That board couldn't even finish POSTing. I'm sorry, but someone over at Gigabyte really needs to get a handle on QA.
I ended up with an Asus Maximus V Extreme for $350 AR and paired it with the aforementioned i7 3770K. Tri-SLI works great. No fuss, no muss, no having to move it from case to test bench and back to case.