Computex 2009: Hardware Preview

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
It is real - I counted the drivers: 1 driver, 2 FET, 1 small choke. Gigabyte makes the biggest un-necessary dick swing to date.

(and vdbswong)

Oops, should have read the article properly, sorry...

Originally Posted by IanW

Quote:

Originally Posted by yakyb
im a little concerned by the lack of onboard GPUs on the p55's i have seen so far

You won't see onboard GPUs on any P55 motheboards. You'll have to wait for the G55 variants.

The codename you want in Havendale. The GPU will be integrated onto the CPU.

Originally Posted by BlackMage23
Are there 2 USB 3.0 ports on the Gigabyte boards? or am I just seeing things.

That's a good question. If those are 3.0 ports, they would need to be handled via an add in chip. I think NEC is the only manufacturer with a 3.0 HC at the moment. I didn't see anything obvious in photos though.
If those are 3.0 ports, then I am also curious about BIOS support for the 3.0 ports.

Glad to see both MSI and Gigabyte making good P55 boards.

But I really do hope they come out before the end of summer...

All those so called "industrial leaders" still manage to put a 300 year old FDD controller on the boards. Yet they come with all kind of 'new' funky stuff to slam on the motherboards. I bet they get payed by Sony to put on FDD controllers since Sony is the only Floppy Drive manufacturer left on this earth, they probably have a stock of 1.2 billion FD's in a gigantic warehouse. Do like Atari did with their E.T. cartridges and dig a large hole in the Mexican desert, drop the drives in there and forget about it for ever and beyond...

Well, Sony has to make some kind of money, I mean after all the piece of craps they've made.

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
All those so called "industrial leaders" still manage to put a 300 year old FDD controller on the boards. Yet they come with all kind of 'new' funky stuff to slam on the motherboards. I bet they get payed by Sony to put on FDD controllers since Sony is the only Floppy Drive manufacturer left on this earth, they probably have a stock of 1.2 billion FD's in a gigantic warehouse. Do like Atari did with their E.T. cartridges and dig a large hole in the Mexican desert, drop the drives in there and forget about it for ever and beyond...

Thre are these things called Super I/O chips. They come with a lot of different legacy controllers on them like floppy, serial, LPT, PS/2, and stuff like that. They also have hardware health monitoring, POST code port 80h functionality and other handy things on them.

If you are working with an older OS like XP or server 2003, a driver floppy is an easy way to get your storage driver loaded. Both installers tend to be picky about USB floppy drives. Both OSes are used enough for OEMs to just break out the floppy port they are already paying for.

I can think of a few other reasons an OEM might decide to break out the floppy on a super I/O chip, but these tend to be for disaster recovery or debugging.

You don't have to use it, the controller is already part of a chip used for other stuff, and the port doesn't take up that much space. What would be a good alternative to the space used that isn't already there?

Originally Posted by Gremlin
I -love- that gigabyte are making the AMD bios hack available on all dual bios SB750, and I assume SB710 boards even though it wasn't mentioned in the article, since it has ACC and its the chipset on the 785G board shown :)

Yes - everything with ACC will get it. 785G/SB710 and 790GX/GFX/SB750 boards should have the option eventually.

Originally Posted by ch424
(and vdbswong)

Oops, should have read the article properly, sorry...

:)

Originally Posted by Splynncryth
That's a good question. If those are 3.0 ports, they would need to be handled via an add in chip. I think NEC is the only manufacturer with a 3.0 HC at the moment. I didn't see anything obvious in photos though.
If those are 3.0 ports, then I am also curious about BIOS support for the 3.0 ports.

No, no USB 3.0.

ALL Gigabyte boards will get POWERED eSATA though in the future - eSATA ports will double up as USB and visa versa - ideal for external eSATA flash drives like from OCZ.

MSI currently has this on its 790FX AM3 we reviewed (and didnt realise at the time), and will also push it on its own P55 boards too.

for powered eSATA drives, will it work with existing set of eSATA portable drives?

We (GIGABYTE) feel that 24 power phase will be important.
It may not seem like this now, but I will guarantee you that our competitor will follow – Why, because it is vital that the power phases switch power effectively.
When we introduced 2oz copper, we were told the same type of story – no need for 2oz, it’s a waste of time etc… but now other manufactures are starting to introduce this, yet no one seems to be challenging them!

I think that most people are under-estimating the P55 performance vs the X58.
This is going to be very interesting and I’m excited and can’t wait for Bit-tech to release the performance result – we can always trust Bit-tech/CustomPC 

GIGABYTE will originally only release SATA II and USB2.0
The reason is because SATA III at the moment has no advantage in performance.
The same for USB3.0, so for now, SATA II and USB2.0 will be standard

GIGAMAN

You would expect a representative from Gigabyte to know how to use punctuation and to use the correct name for SATA 6Gbps. :(

So, on one hand you say 24 power phases aren't important now but will be in the future and that's why you include them. In the next paragraph you say that SATA 6Gbps and USB3.0 aren't important now but will be in the future and that's why you DON'T include them.

Make up your mind. :|