‘Pi is Returned’: A GIGABYTE OC Contest on HWBOT

Last Friday evening we launched our latest overclocking contest on HWBOT, Pi is Returned. The big news with this contest is that AMD and ourselves have managed to stump up some nice fat cash prizes – over 5 grand in total as well as some pretty attractive hardware prizes too.

The idea is pretty simple: Two AMD platforms – FM2/1 & AM3+ - on two classic benchmarks – Super Pi 1M and Super Pi 32M. Here’s the break down of stages and prizes in more detail:

Group A - FM1/2 (Llano/Trinity/Richland)

Stage1: Super Pi 1M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - FM2A85XN-WIFI & AMD A10-6800K
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 11sec 359ms (full list)

Stage2: Super Pi 32M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - FM2A85XN-WIFI & AMD A10-6800K
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10min 40sec 875ms (full list)

Group B – AM3+ (Bulldozer/Piledriver)

Stage1: Super Pi 1M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - 990FXA-UD3 & AMD FX-8350
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10sec 93ms (full list)

Stage2: Super Pi 32M

• 1st place - USD $500
• 2nd place - USD $250
• 3rd place - 990FXA-UD3 & AMD FX-8350
• World Record - USD $500
• Target score: 10min 31sec 770ms (full list)

Note: the World record bonus prize of USD $500 will be awarded at the end of the competition to the highest score per stage, if the target record has been broken.

Visit the official Pi is Returned competition page on HWBOT here.

Jeffrey Stephenson creates Flightline PC using a GIGABYTE Thin Mini-ITX board

Just to follow up on Dino’s blog below. Here are some more details. Renowned craftsman and PC builder Jeffrey Stephenson (known to many as SlipperySkip) has now completed his latest creation, Flightline. Inspired by the Wright Brothers Memorial in North Carolina, and sporting a GIGABYTE Thin Mini-ITX board, Flightline is basically a desk ornament that is also a PC. The outer shell is made of quilted maple, maple burl, mahogany, lace wood and aircraft grade birch plywood, i.e. several types of damn good quality wood…

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves…

Despite being really thin, the piece offers a thoroughly decent level of performance, powered by an Intel Core i3-3225 processor on a GIGABYTE H77TN Thin Mini-ITX motherboard with 8GB DDR3 and 60GB mSATA SSD. Not too shabby…

Check out this article on BoingBoing, plus the full monty on Jeffrey’s website slipperyskip.com

More info about the GIGABYTE H77TN here.

Custom PC to rule them all!

We often catch glimpse of some amazing works of art by custom PC builders and I am always in such state of amazement what creativity and dedication people show to “prettyfy” their PCs. So a mate of mine tells me about this amazing custom build by a bloke on OCAU (Overclockers Australia) forum calling himself “slipperyskip” and what a build this was. I won’t spoil the full build so I’ll put up a couple of photos but for the full worklog click on this forum thread address and keep scrolling down!

Stunning!

TeamAU take global 3DMARK03 world record!

I had a bit of a play with my favourite new toy (GIGABYTE Z87X-OC) running Intel 4770K and tripple crossfire 7970 and nailed the global 3DMARK03 world record tonight. Haswell is exceptionally fast clock for clock. It easily beats Ivy Bridge in benchmarks like 3D03 with up to 10% lower frequency.

Check out TeamAU Facebook page or OCAU forum for more details.

dinos22

Anandtech interview Jackson Hsu, Motherboard Product Management Director at GIGABYTE

A couple of weeks ago Anandtech’s chief motherboard reviewer Ian Cutress had the opportunity to get face to face with one of the most important men in our office, Mr Jackson Hsu – motherboard product management director here at GIGABYTE.

Taking a pretty relaxed and open approach to the questions Ian posed, Jackson’s interview offers what is in many respects, a fly-on-the-wall view of just how much hard work, communication and sheer endeavor goes into designing, manufacturing and marketing our motherboards. A pretty interesting piece I hope you all enjoy.

Anandtech.com

TweakTown investigate the power delivery of the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force

With the Ultra Durable™ 5 last year GIGABYTE introduced our new power design using Powerstage controllers and ICs from IR, debuting on our boards like the Z77X-UP7. The clear advantage of using these components was efficiency and good thermals. Simply put they get power to the CPU and memory without producing too much heat, even when you ramp them up and push the performance to the limit.

But it can a tad frustrating for a marketing guy when you try and actually get solid proof of these claims, especially as the vast majority of motherboard reviewers tend to focus on features, price and general performance. To be fair, few reviewers actually have the means to explore heat dissipation and efficiency.

Which was why it’s really great to see Chris Ramsayer of TweakTown dusting off his thermal imaging camera and taking a good hard look at the PWM of our Z87X-OC Force motherboard, one our new Ultra Durable™ 5 Plus boards launched a few months ago. Here’s sample of what he had to say, plus some fascinating images:

“At this point in the test, I'm under the impression that GIGABYTE's new PWM cooler is amazing. With temps like the set we ran we needed to find out what happens when we take the heat sink off.

In the image above, we removed the PWM heat sink and stressed the CPU with performance benchmarks running in a loop. Surprisingly, the warmest IR3550 only reached 45C and a majority of the digital PWM chips hovered right around 40C with am ambient room temperature of 20C.”

Here’s a video Chris shot. Chris explains:

“In the video embedded above, we see the system with and without the heat sink installed. In both cases, we used a timeline for testing with Cinebench 11.5 with the computer shut down and at room temperature to start with. Cinebench starts for the first time at 1 minute and 20 seconds. A new Cinebench CPU run starts every 1 minute and 10 seconds after so at 2 min 30 sec, 3 min 40 sec, 4 min 50 sec and finally at the 6 minute mark. Most of the PWMs reach 40C, but nothing goes over 45C.”

 

Check out the full article on TweakTown here.

 

More info on the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force can be found here.

Dino talks high-end audio at PAX Australia 2013

Just came across this video from PAX Australia a few weeks ago where our man in Aus, Dino, fields some interesting questions about our new 8 series boards from a young fella from JTLProductions, a gaming channel covering the show. Interesting to see that journalists are looking younger than ever, yet actually having the brains to ask pretty well thought-out questions.

 

You can find more info on our G-Killer gaming series of motherboards here.