Category Archives: Mainboard

|Review| MSI Big Bang Xpower II

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INTRODUCTION

The Big Bang series of mainboards from MSI such as Trinergy, Fuzion, XPower, and Marshal is not new to most users. The Big Bang series is designed and tailor-made for gamers and extreme power users by utilising the best components to deliver the best performance. Each of the Big Bang series mainboards have their own focus points. For XPower, one will immediately realise that Power has always been the No. 1 feature. Evidently, MSI’s flagship X79 mainboard, Big Bang-XPower II, features the Xtreme Power Design with an overwhelming 22 phase hybrid digital power design and supports 4-way NVIDIA SLI & AMD CrossFireX via PCI Express Gen3.

As the top level of the Big Bang Series, the Big Bang-XPower inherits a concept of extreme power and unlimited performance, hoping to provide extreme gamers with the smoothest visual and sound experience, high-standard specifications and various MSI-exclusive technologies. Apart from powerful features, a golden color in a diamond-like metal design is used to identify its unrivaled quality and ultimate performance. The Big Bang-XPower’s unique character integrates performance and stability.

MSI

MSI Bing Bang Microsite - http://event.msi.com/mb/bigbang/index.html
Big Bang-XPower II – http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Big-Bang-XPower-II.html
Big Bang Xpower II Preview  - http://www.ocdrift.com/msi-big-bang-xpowerii-pictured/

 MSI Big Bang Xpower II received the Editor’s Choice Award from OCDrift.com

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|PR| GIGABYTE Unveils Next Gen Motherboard Digital Power Engine at CES 2012

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Las Vegas, USA, January, 10th 2012 – GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced its participation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas where it is debuting a number of new and exciting motherboard technologies that will be central to it’s motherboard design in 2012 and beyond. International media and customers will get a sneak peak of GIGABYTE’s new technologies at their suite in The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, from January 10-13.

3D Power: Frequency, Voltage and Phase Control
GIGABYTE is showing forthcoming 7 series motherboards featuring the very latest in CPU power delivery with GIGABYTE’s unique Digital Power Engine called 3D Power. Offering digital control over all the main onboard power zones, this new digital PWM design allows users to manipulate and monitor the power provided to 2nd Gen Intel® Core™ and Next Gen processors for the LGA 1155 socket.

“We are very excited about the new technologies that will feature on our 7 series motherboards, and are confident that our customers will find them, together with the performance and feature improvements on Intel’s future platform, extremely appealing,” commented Henry Kao, Vice President of GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit. “Product development and debugging for the new features is progressing really well, and we expect to have a full range of products available globally by launch day.”

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ASUS Rampage IV Extreme: Hidden feature unveiled for HD7970

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A few hours ago, Shamino posted a thread at kingpincooling forum.
ASUS R&D have somehow figured out a way to publish voltage modifications for graphics card; these include control VGA loadline, switching frequency, OverCurrent Protection and core voltage.

Control Load Line, Switching Freq, OCP, Voltage of 7970 with R4E
First solder red and black headers to VGA card:

The headers will be later on plug into MB.

Steps

Do Not plug in the header before boot.
After Boot and go into OS, plug in header
Open Digipower CNTRL (install from CD)

you can set load line, Switching Freq, OCP, it will be set with the CPU’s vcore, so suggest set LL Extreme, Switching Freq 500 to 800, disable OCP (this will also be used for the VGA Vcore)
If you also wanna adjust vcore of VGA, u can open up Turbo V and adjust the CPU Vcore together with the VGA vcore. VGA vcore will be 100mv lesser than what you set on the CPU. For eg, 1.40 will give 1.30 on VGA.
After adjust and ready to bench remove header. Settings hould be kept even at reset unless you shutdown.

Do not have the header plugged in at boot as it will make the system stop booting.
Enjoy.

MSI Big Bang XpowerII Pictured

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The Package

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|PR| MSI Big Bang-XPower II

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MicroStar International (MSI) has officially announced their latest flagship mainboard for the Intel® X79 Express chipset, the Big Bang-XPower II.

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|Review| Asrock Z68 Fatal1ty GEN3

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INTRODUCTION

Before we begin, OCDrift.com would like to thank Zeon PC Trading for the opportunity given to test this mainboard and eventually making this review a reality.

Intel Z68 is the latest chipset supporting their 2nd Generation Core-i series. Before Z68, there’s H61, H67 and P67 chipsets. While Z68 chipset is certainly a not new but still, we reckon that it’s still a chipset worth to invest for. Why? Because the newly launched X79 chipset is mainly for enthusiast and big-spenders with high buying power as the Sandy Bridge-E processors pricing is currently on the high side now. As for the 2nd Generation Core-i series processor, widely known as Sandy Bridge is now entering the mainstream market providing one of the best price/performance ratio solution.

Asrock Z68 Fatal1ty GEN3 is the top of the line mainboard among Asrock Z68 mainboards. For ASRock high-end models, it can be easily identified via the Red-Black colour scheme and the “Fatal1ty” theme. We are glad to be given the honour to review this beast and please do continue exploring this review to know more about this mainboard.

Official Link – Enter
Asrock Fatal1ty Microsite – Enter
ZEON PC Trading (ASRock Distributor, Malaysia) – Enter

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ASUS ROG X79 Motherboard: Rampage IV Extreme Features Talk About

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ASUS Rampage IV Extreme

Another masterpiece born from Shamino’s hands, this should be best motherboard cater for extreme overclockers up to date, why? Let’s go through of my 3 short pages write-up and you will know why and who are the target users with all features that come with this ROG.

VGA Hot-Wire

Have you ever experience with graphics card voltage modification before? Well, if you do, you gonna love this feature. In the past, we used to solder variable resistor to graphics card in order to overclock further, even on watercooling it does scale pretty satisfiable . Ever since GTX 200 series generation, manufacturer starting to implement voltage controller on graphics card where by voltage can be controlled by software, it is pretty convenient and without voiding warranty. Nevertheless, physical vmod still necessary for extreme overclocking, eg prevent OCP kick in.

With VGA Hot-wire, a built-in variable resistor control through motherboard BIOS, voltage increment in offset basis.
On Rampage IV Extreme, it has 2 sets of VGA Hot-wire, 6pins header per set, and each set for single graphics card.

Each set consists of :-

  • Core voltage(vGPU)
  • Memory voltage(vMem)
  • PLL voltage(vPLL)

Voltage modification point(feedback or Vsense loop) goes to RED header while voltage measurement goes to BLACK header.

CAUTION: GROUND IS NOT NEEDED HERE, DO NOT CONNECT GROUND TO BLACK HEADER

In order to avoid confusion during extreme overclocking session, ASUS bundled with labeling sticker.

Note:
To cater all graphics card, voltage increment are on offset basic.
- Do check voltage every time and adjust step by step
- Big jump in voltage when increase from +96 to +97.
- Core Voltage Boost are made available just in case, DO NOT ENABLE, unless +222 is not enough for you.
- Voltage measurement read up to 3.30v, which is pretty much adequate, not to mention we can hardly use up to 2.0v.

Tip:
As I have mentioned it is control in offset basic, which mean, you can control up to 6 graphics card, assume core voltage vmodded only for each card, or 3 cards with both Core voltage and Memory voltage vmodded.

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MSI X79 Pictured

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MSI Big Bang Xpower II

 

Board Overview

 

Under the PWM Heatsink

Back Panel I/O

  • 1x PS2
  • CMOS Clear Button
  • 6xUSB 2.0
  • 4xUSB 3.0
  • 1xCoaxial SPDIF out
  • 1xOptical SPDIF out
  • 2xRJ45 LAN Port

 

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|Review| ASUS E350M1-M Pro

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Introduction
AMD Zacate was already in the market for quite sometimes. This platform is meant to support the system that runs with low power consumption. There is a trade-off for a low power system, the performance. You have to sacrifice the system performance in order to get a low power consumption system. This system is not meant for heavy tasking user but more to light casual use. Because this system consumes very less power, it is ideal for downloading and torrenting system. The processor is equipped with a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) AMD Radeon HD6310. The GPU is quite weak for a 3D application like gaming, but the GPU supports Universal Video Decoder (UVD) technology. This technology makes the High Definition video playback smooth. This means that this system also suitable for a Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC)

Click here is the official link for the mainboard

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|Preview| ASUS X79 Motherboard line up

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Let the pictures do the talking

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