Previews - Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard examined

[HEXUS]

Say hello to my little friend.

Read more.

[kalniel]

Who dropped the motherboard?

[Tarinder]

Erm, the courier, honest

[Steve A]

Maybe they were trying to seat it in a goldfish bowl

[chis]

No that's probably the Foxconn socket bending the motherboard...

(I hope I'm wrong)

[this_is_gav]

Can I make a request to the Hexus reviewers? Not related to this board, but with the new Intel and AMD chips, could Hexus try underclocking and undervolting and seeing how little power a system draws then? Not for the high-end boards, such as the above, but I'm thinking more those where they include the on-chip display outputs, leaving the dedicated graphics cards out of the system for those tests?

Some info on the low-power flexibility of these chips for home servers/HTPCs would be excellent.

Not on every review obviously - there's little point in underclocking and undervolting an hexa-core CPU to see how little power it draws, but it would be much appreciated to get some numbers on how frugal they are at the lower end of the new CPU options.

[sadbuttrue]

I see Gigabyte have continued their trend of placing a PCI-E 1x slot directly behind a massive heatsink, making it completely unusable for all but the smallest cards

[Tarinder]

Can I make a request to the Hexus reviewers? Not related to this board, but with the new Intel and AMD chips, could Hexus try underclocking and undervolting and seeing how little power a system draws then? Not for the high-end boards, such as the above, but I'm thinking more those where they include the on-chip display outputs, leaving the dedicated graphics cards out of the system for those tests?

Some info on the low-power flexibility of these chips for home servers/HTPCs would be excellent.

Not on every review obviously - there's little point in underclocking and undervolting an hexa-core CPU to see how little power it draws, but it would be much appreciated to get some numbers on how frugal they are at the lower end of the new CPU options.

Sure, no problem. We'll do this for the Sandy Bridge review.

[GaryRW]

Sure, no problem. We'll do this for the Sandy Bridge review.

Even more generally and off topic of this particular board, can I also ask you to look at low power usage when reviewing motherboards as well as CPU's. I appreciate it may be very difficult to get a consistent view on power the motherboard itself is using, but any info would be good. How about an extra page, with a low spec CPU and sensibly rated PSU, and seeing how low you can get power draw to be with relatively standard components?

I think there's more than a few people interested in this side of computing, yet the vast majority of websites only ever look at the overclocking/high power option. As this_is_gav has said, I guess that's understandable on top end boards. But when the low power athlon II 'e' models came out a while back, it seemed I could only find reviews that focused on whether the low power designation allowed for higher overclocks, not whether there were appreciable power savings to be had, let alone trying to underclock them. iirc the reviews also tended to use 750w+ PSU's and monstrous graphics cards...

I appreciate it'll be extra work to put in another CPU and power supply, take out the discrete GPU etc... but I think Hexus would draw more people to it as this is only tackled by a handful of sites.

[tumbledragon]

I hope Gigabyte put out a sandy bridge board with an EFI, using a SSD the BIOS is 75% of the boot time.