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Over the years, Gigabyte has given us some interesting products.  More recently in the past 18 months, Rajinder gave their H55N-USB3 motherboard a well deserved recommendation, and more recently, I have scrutinized their Sandy Bridge range.  For X79, Gigabyte is uncharacteristically launching only a few motherboards, of which we are looking at their cheapest model, the GA-X79-UD3.  We are also for the first time introduced to what Gigabyte believe should be a graphical BIOS compared to their competitors.   Read on for the full review.

Every time a new GPU launches, it finds its way into half a dozen or more cards from different manufacturers. These manufacturers do their best to differentiate these cards from one another, usually by means of different fans, form factors, outputs, prices, or even a built-in overclock. It can sometimes be difficult to keep these differences straight – price comparisons are usually pretty easy to make on sites like Amazon or Newegg, but information about dimensions and clock speed can be more difficult to come by. So, I'd like to try something a little different.

I'd like to gather all of the information on these cards that I can from press releases, manufacturer product pages, and retailer sites, put it all in one place in an easy-to-parse format, and then distill it to help all of you make better buying decisions. This shouldn't be confused with one of our in-depth hardware reviews, nor am I necessarily trying to recommend one card over another – while one person may want a larger cooler or a higher stock clock, another person may need the shortest card they can find for a cramped case. If you find this helpful (or if it's missing something important that would make it more helpful to you), please give me feedback and let me know what you'd like to see!

The GPU I'm looking at today is the newly-released (and recently reviewed) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores, a low-end enthusiast card that trades blows with AMD's Radeon HD 6950 in most of our benchmarks (though it consistently beats the 6950 in the "longest, silliest name" benchmark). At present, there are five of these cards available on Newegg: one each from MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac, and two from EVGA. The table below lays out the important numbers for you.

 

Gigabyte

MSI

Zotac

EVGA (FTW)

EVGA (Classified)

Core Clock

732 MHz

880 MHz

765 MHz

797 MHz

797 MHz

Memory Clock (Effective)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

1002 MHz (4008 MHz)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

Shader Clock

1464 MHz

1760 MHz

1530 MHz

1594 MHz

1594 MHz

Dimensions (in mm)

280 x 136.6 x 43

243 x 115 x 42

228.6 x 111.3 x 33.5

228.6 x 111.15 x ??

266.7 x 111.15 x ??

Outputs

DVI-I, DVI-D, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

Power connectors

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

6-pin, 8-pin

Included cables

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter, Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Mini HDMI to HDMI, Molex to 6-pin adapter, 8-pin adapter

Warranty

3-year

3-year

2-year

3-year

3-year

Price (Newegg)

4.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

Common to all of these cards is 1280MB of GDDR5 memory on a 320-bit bus, dual-slot coolers, and manuals with driver CDs (though I imagine most of you reading this will toss out the manual and get new drivers directly from NVIDIA, as well you should). Now that we have all of the data, let's analyze it.

Gigabyte

Gigabyte's card gets a lot of "mosts" in this comparison – it's the most  expensive of the bunch, it has the most fans (3), and as a result of this massive cooler it's also the longest, tallest, and widest (we don't have width measurements for either EVGA card, but they're both smaller than this card in the other dimensions). This cooler, called the "Windforce 3X" in Gigabyte's press release, uses a vapor chamber to circulate heat. The three fans are said to be "ultra quiet" but no specific noise levels are given.

Despite this impressive cooling solution, Gigabyte is also the only manufacturer to adhere to NVIDIA's reference clock speeds for both the core and memory. I imagine that cooler could get enterprising overclockers some nice results, but Gigabyte won't be meeting you halfway.

The last item of note is that the Gigabyte card is the only one with a DVI-D port – the others all use two DVI-I ports. Along with its full-size HDMI and DisplayPort options, you should be able to plug just about any display into this thing. 

MSI

 

MSI's card, tied with Zotac's offering for second-most expensive, also comes with a fancy cooler, but is 40 mm shorter in length than the Gigabyte card. It's not the shortest card of the bunch, but it's not far off. MSI claims that the cooler, their well-reviewed Twin Frozr III (loving these names, by the way), is both 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference design, though "reference" in this case likely means NVIDIA's GTX 570 reference cooler since NVIDIA doesn't have a reference design for the GTX 560 Ti w/448 cores. MSI's specs list the card as being only 30dB loud at full speed – this is very impressive on paper (we recorded 43dB at idle and 47.1dB at load for the Zotac card's single-fan cooler), though keep in mind that this information comes from marketing materials and not hard data.

This card is also the fastest clocked of the group, with a roughly 17% faster core and 10% faster memory clock out of the box. If you don't want to venture into the potentially warranty-voiding field of overclocking, the MSI card may be your best bet for slightly higher frame rates.

With respect to outputs, this card is one of the most limited here – just two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port (a Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle is included), which has been NVIDIA's common reference configuration for the GTX 500 series. It shouldn't be a problem for most, but if you use DisplayPort you'll want to invest in an adapter.

Zotac

 

If you read our GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores review, this card will be familiar to you – this is the only one of the lot that we've actually had in our hands, and we came away fairly impressed by its performance, its array of outputs, and its cooler. Thanks to this single-fan cooler, it's tied with the EVGA FTW card for the shortest card in the group, but it only sports a modest 4% core overclock. It's also the only card of the lot  with a 2-year warranty instead of a 3-year warranty.

It ties with the MSI card for second-most expensive at 9.99, but it does appear to be the only card in the list that includes a game (Battlefield 3). Note that information on things like this can be hard to come by – the only place where the inclusion of Battlefield 3 is apparent is in our review and in the product photos on Newegg, two resources unavailable for the rest of these cards (for most of the others, Newegg has only pictures of the card and the box). If you don't already have Battlefield 3 and you want it, this card's value becomes much more competitive.

EVGA (FTW)

If price is your primary concern, this may be the card for you – of these five, the FTW-series card is the only one selling at NVIDIA's MSRP of 9. Its single-fan cooler ties it with the Zotac for smallest card here. The difference is that the EVGA card appears to use a partially shrouded cooler that only exhausts air out the front and rear, as opposed to the Zotac's open and perforated cooler.

This card's core and memory clocks are just a bit higher than Zotac's: an 8% overclock on the core and a 2.6% overclock on the memory. It's not much, but it's probably worth a few FPS. Output selection is also good – two DVI-I ports, full-size HDMI and a DisplayPort make this a solid-looking card, and if you don't need Battlefield 3 or a fancy cooler you may as well save yourself the (or , compared to the Gigabyte).

EVGA (Classified)

The EVGA Classified card's 8-pin power plug makes it a bit of an oddball – but we suspect EVGA is using a GTX 580 PCB here instead of a GTX 570 PCB as they did on the FTW. The core and memory speeds are the same as in the FTW-series card, so as with the other Classified cards this is really geared towards end-user overclocking rather than a factory overclock.

At any rate, the Classified-series card includes a large two-fan cooler that makes it the second longest in our lineup, though it's less wide than the Gigabyte cooler by a fair amount. For the price difference (this is the second cheapest card here), overclockers may prefer this to the FTW model for its cooling power and PCB, and to the Gigabyte and MSI cards for its slightly lower price, though overclocking speeds are of course never guaranteed.

Compared to the FTW model, DisplayPort users should note that this card regresses a bit in terms of available output – two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port are all that's available, though like the MSI card EVGA is kind enough to include a Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter.

NETWORKING CHIP DESIGNER Qualcomm Atheros has announced that its Killer E2100 networking processing unit (NPU) is on board Gigabyte’s X79 based PC motherboards.

Gigabyte’s G1.Assassin2 X79 based motherboard integrates the Killer E2100 chipset to provide improved performance for online gaming, high definition video and other tasks. Typically this technology would be plugged into the motherboard via a dedicated card or add-on PCi card.

Tim Handley, deputy director of motherboard marketing at Gigabyte said, “Killer E2100 is a perfect addition to our portfolio of motherboards based on the X79 chipset, as it delivers our customers the best in high-performance networking along with complete control of bandwidth allocation. This ensures a top-quality experience and faster-paced game play.”

The Advanced Steam Detect feature of the Killer E2100 can identify gaming or high definition video and audio to avoid interruption. A Visual Bandwidth Controller helps the user view and control which applications are using the bandwidth. The software can also prioritise certain traffic such as gaming and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) applications.

The Killer E2100 NPU comes with 1GB of RAM and helps free up the main processor for other tasks. The goal is to achieve a flawless gaming experience with zero latency interruptions.

Todd Antes, VP of product management at Qualcomm Atheros said, “At Qualcomm Atheros, we are focused on providing high-performance technology that empowers people to have full control over their home networks. The Killer Technology product line continues to be a noteworthy addition with its outstanding performance, unrivaled intelligence and superior control.” µ

Gigabyte has released their Z68 lineup, and I am going to look at the UD3H – a 0 Z68 board aimed at the mainstream consumer market. The Z68 based motherboards are very similar to the P67 equivalent but they have had a few extra features added. They include Virtu and SSD caching as well as allowing you to take advantage of the GPU built into your Sandy Bridge processor. Is it worth switching from P67 to Z68 for a few extra features?

 

IN THE HIGH END ARENA the AMD Radeon HD6990 and Nvidia Geforce GTX590, both dual GPU cards, now share the top performance position in PC 3D. Both cards have very high power usage, large size and lots of RAM. The 3GB of memory on the GTX590 and the 4GB on the HD6990 equal the average mainstream PC main system memory capacity.

The Radeon HD6990 is particularly interesting as there has been barely any clock frequency sacrifice over the single GPU HD6970, despite fitting two of these on a single card and adhering to all the power limitations. The only other performance penalty (and very slight at that – below one per cent) is the PLX PCIe bridge chip on each card, required to enable two GPUs to share one PCIe x16 interface to the host computer.

In applications beyond gaming, multi GPU setups like this are usable in workstations and even in supercomputing application niches, where each GPU can run a task, handling accelerated threads or specific routines that make sense to run on them. After all, the single HD6990 can offer nearly 6TFLOPs in single precision and 1.5 TFLOPs in double precision. However, running a single thread across multiple GPUs efficiently is right now still very hard to do as there is no clear shared memory model between two or more GPUs due to the PCI express bus communication. Once this is solved, though, there will be many more suitable applications for multiple GPU usage.

But back to the gaming world. Since new AMD Catalyst drivers did improve multi GPU Crossfire scaling quite a bit last year, it was an interesting question of how high scores would be achieved in the usual 3Dmark benchmarks with two HD6990 cards, with four GPUs in total. Of course, with that many high end graphics processors there has to be sufficient CPU horsepower to feed them.

So we combined the new Intel Core i7 990X CPU, running at 3.46GHz with the trusted Gigabyte X58A UD9 mainboard, the well featured top end overclocking reference and possibly the most expensive high-end single processor mainboard ever. It has two NF200 Bridge ASICs from Nvidia to enable four full x16 PCIe slots, resulting in a little larger than usual size. The 6GB of GEIL DDR3-2133 gamers’ memory, Intel X25-M 160GB SSD and Antec 1200W high end power supply, are easily capable of feeding the high-end hardware. The 64 bit Windows 7 install used default settings in the drivers and benchmark test applications.

Here are the 3Dmark Vantage and 3Dmark 11 test results. They speak for themselves:

As you can see, the combination of four GPUs and six CPU cores on a good motherboard can – even at default mode without any overclocking – achieve very high scores. This is up to some three times the score of a single HD6970 on the same processor platform, a very reasonable scaling benefit in either test.

Yes, the benchmark is just a benchmark, but it still shows well the scaling results and the platform’s performance potential. Now, the issue of heat does come up, so you’d better ensure that the case is spacious enough with strong airflow to match, as graphics cards these days create way more heat than the processors. µ

Thus far, we’ve spent most of 2010 focusing on mainstream segments for our motherboards reviews, there’s more of that to come over the next few months starting off with a long overdue focus on AMD. Before we get to that though, there are a few loose ends to tie up on Intel’s X58 chipset – today we’re going to take a look at four motherboards aimed at the serious enthusiast.

THE INQUIRER

Review GA 7TCSV2 with L5640 ultra low power Xeons

We’ve been waiting for one of the major players to get their mitts into mini-ITX for Intel’s chipsets and finally Gigabyte has delivered with the Intel H55 chipset based H55N-USB3.

ECS did us all a favour by introducing their H55H-I at an incredible , forcing Intel and to lower the price of the competing DH57JG down to 0. Following suit, Gigabyte’s H55N-USB3 touches down around the 5 mark – a perfect fit if Gigabyte delivers the finesse that’s missing on current mini-ITX products. Find out how Gigabyte’s latest offering fares on our test bench…