GIGABYTE OC Lab Gets Overrun….by OC Sharks!

 

Last week the GIGABYTE OC lab hosted some world famous benchers to destroy hardware, go through massive quantities of LN2 and have a great time doing it. In the process several world records have fallen. We can’t post the scores just yet, but notice everyone but the shark and “Jake” are smiling. Congrats guys on an outstanding week of benching!

GIGABYTE G1 Gets a New Look

 

 

Along with the new red color, GIGABYTE G1 gaming motherboards have a whole new look about them, including new logo design. What do you guys think? Do you like the new look of G1 Gaming?

G1 Gaming Case Mod

We thought we would give a sneak peak at one of the custom systems our good friend Richard Keirsgieter  from the Netherlands is building for us. It’s not quite finished yet, but so far it is looking pretty sweet! Stay tuned for more pictures of the build coming soon.

Another Day, Another Heatsink

Any guesses as to what board this is? The color should give it away!

The All New G1

As we showed off the red color scheme the other day, here is the world’s first look at the new G1 gaming logo. What other GIGABYTE product uses a similar design?

Power On!

Here is another update from our factory. First power on test happened last week, and we had a film crew on hand to record the milestone. Stay tuned!

GIGABYTE New Ultra Durable Heatsink Design

Here is a first look at the heatsink of one of our upcoming motherboards. Can you spot some other interesting features on this Ultra Durable series board?

Who Says You Shouldn’t Turn on the Red Light?

In case you haven’t noticed, GIGABYTE is getting ready to launch a bunch of new boards into the market very soon. While we aren’t allowed to say too much yet (don’t you just love NDA’s), we thought we’d drop a few teasers in the upcoming weeks to give some hints at what we have in store. Some of the boards are a bit of a departure from our normal lineup. 

Something Big Happening at GIGABYTE Taiwan Factory

Excuse the dust, but GIGABYTE has something big happening at out Taiwan factory. Any guesses as to what?

Whatever it is, it’s going to need a lot of power!

Great news from Intel camp, performance CPUs at budget prices coming soon!

HWBOT just put up an interesting story  with Intel slides talking about some upcoming Intel CPUs which will finally bring back the hardcore enthusiast CPUs at affordable prices. Intel has really been listening to enthusiasts lately and hopefully they keep up with this trend.

Catzilla version 1.2 is out

AllPlayer Group people have released the Catzilla 1.2 version today. Have you guys tried this benchmark yet? It has a wicked sound track and interesting graphics. It also scales with multiGPUs very well. Good way to test your system and if you feel competitive, you can also jump to HWBOT and submit a score and see how well you do against thousands of other scores on their database.

Check it out on YouTube as well to see what it looks and sounds like.

Steponz from USA smashes 3DMARK05 global WR today!

Hot off the press as they say, Steponz just took out the highly contested 3DMARK05 world record today with a new score at 73,835points. 3DMARK05 is one of the 3D benchmarks which is heavily system bound. Basically you have to get your frequencies right and tweak the memory and OS to perfection and execute a top notch score as it’s always a highly contested one. It took Joe a couple of days of trying as I noticed a #3 score yesterday only to dry things off and make it the best we’ve seen in history.

Joe uses GIGABYTE Z87X-OC motherboard and an Intel 4770@6.5GHz cooled by liquid nitrogen along with a Nvidia GTX780Ti and Corsair Dominator Platinum (Samsung IC) memory. All these components are critical in achieving such a killer score.

Respect Joe, keep pushing to the max!

Hardware Asylum podcast is out, sandbagging and consoles are on the menu!

Hey guys, Hardware Asylum have come out with anther interesting podcast today. They are talking about the world of overclocking and a strategy coined “sandbagging” which gained some prominence during the last HWBOT Country Cup (aka. World Cup of Overclocking) in which a lot of teams waited to post some of the final scores on the last day. Some didn’t like this and other had no issues with it. For those who are still scratching your head what sandbagging actually is, tune into the podcast where they compare it to Ebay, Poker and a couple of other things you may be able to relate to better! It’s an interesting discussion and while I don’t particularly agree with some of the ideas on current topics, I always like to have a listen to Dennis’ and Darren’s podcasts.

Click on the link here or here to have a listen.

Haswell Real World Performance: DDR3-1600 RAM Speed Is Not Enough

Our friends from Corsair published an informative blog which I’ve decided to repost here in full to show you how memory speed past DDR3-1600 benefits your daily PC usage on Haswell (Z87) platform. A lot of people are not well informed about this and it’s time to show some testing and examples to inform you why having high speed RAM and a motherboard that is well tuned to run such speeds and timings is important for your daily PCs and why DD3-1600 is just not good enough any more!

It’s a very nice read and for those that are unaware you are literally a few clicks away from getting high speed on your rigs with Gigabyte motherboards provided your memory is capable. In my event hopping outings I occasionally hear confessions from people at LANs saying they purchased high speed ram and still run it at bios defaults. If you’re one of those people, I hope you watch this video I’ve prepared quickly and read the article to understand why it’s important to use that extra speed and timings. Here is a video first showing how to enable XMP profile on Gigabyte boards:

 

Haswell Real World Performance: DDR3-1600 RAM Speed Is Not Enough

The prevailing wisdom in the enthusiast community has been, for generations, that DDR3-1600 is the sweet spot and that faster memory offers at best extremely limited performance improvement and that at worst, it’s snake oil. There’s an element of truth to that; AMD’s Bulldozer architecture and its derivatives see arguably minimal benefit from faster memory, and Ivy Bridge and its predecessors actually were just fine at DDR3-1600. So the idea that the paradigm might have shifted is tough to swallow because it goes against wisdom that’s been ingrained for years, a veritable lifetime in our industry.

Except that it has. DDR3-1600 is quite simply no longer enough for modern chips outside of Ivy Bridge-E and Vishera. That Kaveri benefits from faster memory (at least on the GPU side) is a foregone conclusion that was confirmed by our testing. AnandTech already exhaustively detailed performance scaling with different memory speeds on Haswell, and I’ve studied the effect of memory speed on Battlefield 4’s performance. Between our work and AnandTech’s extremely thorough research, you’d think there would finally be a pervasive understanding of the benefit of faster memory on Haswell, but that hasn’t been the case.

I originally went into this testing specifically trying to determine whether or not overclocking would increase the strain enough on Haswell’s memory controller to justify higher speed memory. In testing, I discovered fairly conclusively that DDR3-1600 essentially leaves performance on the table even at stock clocks.

For testing I ran Intel’s Core i7-4770K at stock speeds and overclocked to 4.5GHz. A 32GB (4x8GB) kit of our Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400 was used to scale from DDR3-1600 CAS 9 to DDR3-2400 CAS 10. Test system specs are as follows:

    Intel Core i7-4770K CPU
        Stock Speed (3.5GHz nominal, turbo to 3.7GHz on four cores or 3.9GHz on one core)
        Overclocked (4.5GHz, 45x100 BClk, 4GHz Northbridge

    Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 Motherboard

    4x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2400
        DDR3-1600 (9-9-9-24 CR2)
        DDR3-1866 (9-9-9-24 CR2)
        DDR3-2133 (10-11-11-31 CR2)
        DDR3-2400 (10-12-12-32 CR2)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Overclocked (980MHz nominal, boost to 1150MHz, 7GHz GDDR5)
    240GB & 480GB Neutron GTX SSDs (for Adobe testing)

I very deliberately chose a mixture of synthetic and real world benchmarks. Cherry picked synthetics can admittedly overstate the importance of higher speed memory; I wanted tangible, demonstrable, practical benefits.

Overclocking the CPU itself had virtually no effect on memory bandwidth, producing results essentially within the margin of error. We’re just going to measure the raw amount of bandwidth made available to the i7 as memory clocks increase.

There’s a very steady increase in bandwidth going from step to step, but read speed tapers off moving from DDR3-2133 to DDR3-2400. This isn’t surprising; Kaveri also started to get shaky around DDR3-2400. Discovering Haswell’s memory controller’s “breaking point” may be worth looking into in the future.  Nonetheless, we’re seeing roughly 18% improvements in raw memory bandwidth at each step until DDR3-2400.

Now we’ll see if that translates at all in the two synthetic benchmarks I’ve included. First up is the x264 HD 5.0 benchmark, which absolutely hammers the CPU.

This benchmark is almost entirely CPU limited, but there are trends to point out: overclocking increases the effect memory bandwidth has on performance (proving the initial hypothesis), and the jump from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1866 is the most significant. The second pass sits almost entirely on the CPU and absolutely hammers it, but the first pass is able to eke out small gains.

The next synthetic is the built-in benchmark in 7-Zip. WinRAR has long been a stronghold of fast memory, but I haven’t used it in ages; 7-Zip is free, fast, and it works.

7-Zip shows modest but steady increases in performance as memory speed goes up, with an unusual jump at DDR3-2400 at stock. These aren’t the kinds of massive gains you might see in WinRAR, but they’re definitely present.

Where things really get interesting are with my two big practical benchmarks: Adobe Media Encoder CC and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

Both of these benchmarks were run with CUDA acceleration enabled in Mercury Playback Engine, and both of them see substantial improvements in running time. The AVCHD encode is able to shave off about 10 seconds, while you can save a full minute with the HDV encode. In fact, on the HDV encode, running the stock CPU with DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400 instead of DDR3-1600 actually gets you pretty close to the 4.5GHz overclock with DDR3-1600.

The Hail Mary in the group is StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. Testing was done at 1080p with all of the settings maxed out, so it at least looks the same way it might on your home system. This is also one of the few games that could theoretically benefit from a framerate higher than 60fps, and any kind of demonstrable performance benefit on the CPU/memory side is valuable.

If you run the i7 at stock with DDR3-2400, it’s basically as fast as a 4.5GHz i7 with DDR3-1600. Bump the 4.5GHz chip’s memory to DDR3-1866 and it starts to soar. Getting roughly 10fps out of something as simple as faster memory is staggering.

When we take a look at the performance results holistically, we see our real world benchmarks are able to eke out a minimum of 5% improved performance by going up to DDR3-2133; even going up to DDR3-1866 still nets a solid jump. DDR3-2400 still has plenty to offer in some cases. Add overclocking to the mix and the performance gaps widen even more.

As far as I’m concerned, the conclusion is simple: DDR3-1600 isn’t enough for Haswell, and it leaves performance on the table. This testing was done with DDR3-1600 CAS 9, when DDR3-1600 CAS 11 is actually exceedingly common and thus even slower. If we’re willing to overclock every component in our system to extract as much as five or ten percent more performance, it seems absurd at this point to cheap out on memory. You can get 16GB of DDR3-1866 CAS 9 for nearly the same price as 16GB of DDR3-1600 CAS 9 on our web store, and DDR3-2133 CAS 10 or CAS 11 isn’t much more than that.

With Haswell I continue to be convinced that DDR3-1866 is the new entry level, and that DDR3-2133 is really the sweet spot. Performance improvements from DDR3-2133 to expensive DDR3-2400 are less consistent, and Haswell’s IMC itself starts to get a little shaky there. I may do more testing in the future to determine where the IMC’s limit is; my experience was that under some circumstances, there’s a slight performance regression from DDR3-2400 when you get to DDR3-3000 (which is an absolutely ridiculous speed). In the meantime, the conclusion remains clear: for modern and especially high performance Haswell and Kaveri systems, DDR3-1600 isn’t enough.

sofos1990 visits GIGABYTE OC lab and takes out some scores with HiCookie

GIGABYTE OC lab occasionally accepts visitors from travelling overclockers, enthusiasts and people who love their overclocking in general. This week I noticed sofos1990 from Greece visited HiCookie at GIGABYTE HQ and it didn’t take long before they broke out the LN2 and started taking some scores down. Sofos1990 is world No.2 overclocker in HWBOT’s OC league and a well respected member of OC community.

HiCookie just posted a dual card DX11 Heaven Unigine world record (it’s also #11 overall in global rankings). They used a GIGABYTE Z87X-OC with 2x Radeon R9 290X graphics cards on LN2.

Nice work guys, keep at it!

Congratulations to Vivi from South Africa on No.1 HWBOT OC League ranking

We would like to congratulate Vivi from South Africa on his world No.1 ranking in the Overclockers League on HWBOT. This is an individual ranking league which has historically been the best benchmark on who the ultimate overclockers are in the world. Vivi has managed to finally concur the top spot after setting his sights on it for the last several months.

We’ve noticed a couple of huge overclocks from the young South African on posted HWBOT this weekend. The scores were multithreaded scores in nature based on based on HWBOT Prime and Wprime. The hardware used was Intel 4770K CPU and GIGABYTE Z87X-OC motherboard which have been Vivi’s “go to” hardware for numerous world records over the last year.

P.S. HWBOT does have other leagues which also attracts some of the biggest names in OC but they are primarily based on team scores and while individuals in Pro OC league do get rankings, it’s more about the team rather than a sole quest for an individual to attack a large number of benchmarks as is in The Overclockers League.

3DMARK03 global world record broken by TeamAU

I figured it was time to dust off the Gigabyte 7970SOC GPUs and Gigabyte Z87X-OC for some 3DMARK03 action today.

It probably wasn’t the smartest idea as it’s been getting pretty humid in Sydney and that means condensation all over the motherboard and VGAs pretty quickly but I used lots of fans LOL (and started browsing local sales site Gumtree for dehumidifiers while I was overclocking heheh).

 

Onto the fun part! I recently sourced an upgraded watercooling setup based on some sweet EK waterblocks and a quad waterclock bridge you see on top of the GPUs which connects all 4 GPU blocks very neatly.

On top of that, all I had to do is buy some new tubing (of course it had to be orange, OC colours FTW!), some Koolance QDC quick fittings and Bob was my uncle. Very flexible setup and now I can literally pull all 4 GPUs out in 10 seconds and check them or clean, dry, troubleshoot, etc etc. I must say that I would make sure to pay attention to the way you mount your GPUs as it is a little different to what I was used, so if you are upgrading from older style blocks make sure you double check your mounting. The older Swiftech, Dtek blocks I used to use had a different mounting mechanism with a GPU backplate which this one is simply mounting screws direct into the waterclock like a normal air cooler style mount. The older gear has no flexibility or performance that these have so it was a timely upgrade that is for sure!

Definitely go check out EK WBs!

Alright so the new 3DMARK03 global world record is at 293,827 points.

You can swing to HWBOT for result details and full spec.

 

dinos22

Wednesday laughs: Have you ever helped mum fix a PC over the phone? #lol

Have you ever had to help your mum fix a computer or anything tech related over the phone? Oh man does Ronny Chieng have a story for you! Ronny is a stand up comic and appeared on Sydney Comedy Festival, pretty funny guy and so true!!!

Warning: Some language, FUNNY!

 

Thanks to Sydney Comedy Festival FB page

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr84R1xi6Tg

AMD’s Mantle: The biggest innovation in gaming since DX 9 says Extremetech

There’s been a lot of talk recently about AMD’s latest technology and I find there are some valid opinions about why Mantle has some worrying trends for the GPU industry with some of the bad old habits creeping up to latest trends in GPU technological development. John Gillooly had a look at this topic in some detail in his article named “The seismic shift facing Nvidia and AMD”. John is a veteran IT/gaming/enthusiast journo that has been there and done that so to speak. It is concerning when someone with such a broadminded view and experience notices a change in the industry that could be detrimental to the end users long term.

That brings me to also mention an article Extremetech has put up recently in which they argue AMD Mantle is the biggest innovation in gaming since DX9 (DirectX 9) which is incidentally the sort of proprietary tech John’s article refers to. Is it really time to let go of DirectX and bypass it completely and develop API that will let games directly interact with GPUs? There probably is but should the big players push for open standard rather than proprietary tech? I think it’s probably in their interest judging by what happened in the past.

The idea behind AMD Mantle is pretty interesting, particularly for the under powered PCs as DirectX was more of an impediment as it created extra overhead in performance and decreased vital FPS so the systems that were used based on AMD Kaveri FM2+ gained the highest FPS when Mantle was enabled while more powerful Intel based system based on GIGABYTE Z87X-D3H and Intel 4770K saw smaller gains with single cards. Basically Mantle untapped the unused frames in a struggling AMD CPU based system by a larger margin.



There was a change once Extremetech ran crossfire and Intel 4770K was just exceptionally fast and was capable of minimising the bottleneck and had better results overall. This would probably change once a third or forth GPU was added in the mix and I’m sure once Mantle matures, people with 3/4way GPU systems and air/water cooled CPUs will be able to untap the heavy bottleneck modern GPUs have. Being early days there was also some mention of irregularities with graphics quality but I am sure a lot of it will get ironed out sooner or later.



Great tech, just wish it was pushed for open standard so that everyone can enjoy, not just people that purchase AMD based GPUs!

AVHUB took a liking to GIGABYTE’s OP-AMP sound implementation, check it out!

Jez Ford from AVHUB is the sort of guy his industry colleagues would point to when they think of an audiophile who can really put sound equipment to the test. That is exactly how I got ahold of Jez by asking a few guys in the industry. It was somewhat of an honour to meet Jez last year and put a PC together for him to test GIGABYTE’s Sniper 5 motherboard’s sound card and OP-AMP technology for that reason. I must say when you deal with someone who is so particular about what he does, it can be a little intimidating and does get the nerves rattled considering you are entering unmarked waters so to speak. Jez turned out to be a nice guy you could have a beer or ten at the local pub and was really intrigued by all the technology that motherboard manufacturers such as GIGABYTE develop these days.

Audiophiles are very particular about their hardware. You can see what I mean when you read the first two paragraphs of the article

'Killer Gaming Motherboard’ screams the packaging for the G1 Sniper5 from Gigabyte, Taiwan-based manufacturer of computer hardware.

Well that’s nice, but why come to an audio magazine with such computerware; why would we be interested?

I put together a rig with some spare parts I had in the lab which included the CoolerMaster HAF XB case and Seidon 240 water cooler running on GIGABYTE Sniper 5, Intel 4770K, Corsair Dominators and ForceGT SSD. The optional OP-AMP kit was also supplied which GIGABYTE sell separately so he can test various sound outputs and basically left it and asked for an honest review, no questions asked (as I always do). I got a call a few weeks later that the PC is ready to be picked up, the testing was done and review submitted to print, exciting! The print version of the article was to come out the following month and I eagerly waited for the mag to see what the man had to say about GIGABYTE’s sound tech. Jez thought it was impressive despite the reservations that linger from audio purists and integrated circuitries. Here are a couple of quotes

But it’s certainly worth connecting the stereo output to your hi-fi direct, so you can hear what the Gigabyte card can do with music. It proved rather impressive.

Our first listening notes show surprise at how little noise could be discerned from the output; it required absolute cranking to dangerously high levels before slight noise was audible, and even that might have been down to the lower-quality-than-usual cable and connectors we used to accommodate the minijack output rather than RCAs

What about this swapping out of different op amps? Hi-fi fans certainly love tweaking, but messing with the circuit boards? Scary! But in we went with the supplied plastic tweezers (see right), swapping out the original (Ti OPA2134PA) for the one extra op amp that comes with the board, an LM4562…………Three more were supplied in a Premium Upgrade Kit — a Burr-Brown OPA2111KP, Linear Technology’s LT1358CN8 and Analog Devices AD827 JNZ. We liked the Analog Devices chip’s slightly brighter more engaging sound too

Jump over to AVHUB for the full review and see what Jez Ford has to say in detail!