The Dutch media was kindly invited at the lovely city of Utrecht for a pre CeBIT presentation of Gigabyte and Intel company. Rendez-vous took place at the castle of Oudaen.

333 Technology revisited :

First part of the presentation focused on the 333 patented design. Like in Paris at the TweaKing Event our host was Public Manager Thomas Chang. With his star like smile he guided us through the wonders and miracles of the 333 technology. Of course stressing where Gigabyte innovated, compared to it's nearest rivals. The 333 onboard acceleration comprises of USB3.0, S-ATA3.0 and power3X. I'm not going into detail as Massman has thoroughly explained it here.

What it all boils down to :

Gigabyte implemented USB3.0 and S-ATA3.0 first on AMD platforms. The AMD chipsets (790,...,890) are not limited in bus transfer rate as with Intel's P55 chipset. The AMD chipset design got enough free bandwidth for maximum performance.



AMD's new 890GX Chipset with 850SB :



Note that the S-ATA3.0 is via the Southbridge on this new motherboard

For the Intel P55 chipset Gigabyte had to invent a workaround to get performance up to scratch. Gigabyte engineers leave the user the option to use normal mode or Turbo mode. Normal mode means the USB3.0 and S-ATA3.0 data passes via the Marvell 9128 to the P55 chipset. This is not optimal as the bus (2.5Gb/s) doesn't support the full speed that USB3.0 and S-ATA3.0 require for max performance. This bottleneck can be lifted by enabling the Turbo mode via the bios. Data is now pumped via the Marvell/NEC controller into one of the available GPU PCI-E slots. This allows maximum transfer, but limits on some motherboards the multi graphics card expandability/performance. X58 remains the superior performance platform.



P55 UD7 with NF200 chipset :




The only 3 motherboards shown where the X58-UD7, P55-UD7 and the brand new 890GPA-UD3H.



One of the demo boxes running. As always Gigabytes partners remain Kingston for the rams and Enermax for the power supplies

I was a bit disappointed to not see the new 890FX mobo's already on display , but Thomas told me there would be other boards present at CeBIT. Let's hope so :)



Gigabyte's X58 UD7, currently being tortured by sir Massman

890GPA-UD3H :

Hot item that day was the new 890GX powered mobo. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves as I can't release much info due to NDA. But I can't wait to get my hands on this and the new 890FX mobo's.




I really like the spaced PCI-E GPU slots, hopefully more motherboard manufacturers will follow this idea on their mobo range



As this board is not aimed at the high end enthusiast crowd, it's only equipped with 4+1 phases. Target are those that want a quick and reliable multimedia platform.


Gigabyte told us to that they improved their heatsinks to maximise heat tranfer. How they achieved it remained unanswered

DX10.1 GPU onboard with 128Mb Sideport memory, ATI's 4290 is mentioned as very overclockable (1150mhz) :p

Let's go CeBIT :

Well this has been a very enjoyable afternoon, with a very good meal and heaps of laughs. Of course we didn't say no to the introduction to the local brewery in the castle. Let's hope we can discover more goodies on the Gigabyte stand at the Cebit. Thank you Bernice and Sibren for the invite, much appreciated!

We will be back with more news soon...



Our colleague reviewer Danny trying to persuade Thomas that Ying and Yang is really a Dutch thingy



Sibren showing off one of the local brewed beers for women. Or was it for the young and baldy ?