Motherboard

This week we have a great giveaway for our readers courtesy of BIOSTAR. They are giving away three BioStar A68N-5000 motherboards to three lucky readers! This competition is only running for a week, so if you get your entry in quick you are in with a good chance of walking …

Perhaps, A-series accelerated processing units (APUs) from Advanced Micro Devices do not offer extreme levels of performance, but since AMD does not really update its top-of-the-range FX-series products, many of its fans turn their heads to the hybrid Fusion chips that feature both x86 and graphics processing engines. In a …

Flagship parts on a mainstream platform can cause confusion for motherboard vendors. Do they go all-out, offering 4-way SLI and CrossFire via a PLX chip, with the knowledge that many people inclined for such configurations will use a HEDT platform instead? Or do they put that expenditure into a full-blooded …

Z87 saw cost-effective gaming-calibre motherboards take the limelight. All of the big vendors released at least one product that provided gaming-orientated features in a cost-effective package. Asus SKU of choice was the successful Hero – a board which ticked many of the boxes and did so with an efficient price …

The original Raspberry Pi miniature system birthed a bunch of exciting projects around the world, from teaching children the basics of programming and integration, to building quadcopters, MAME machines, time-lapse cameras and a host of others. Now though a new version has been launched, with the creators keen to point …

A web-site has published the first details regarding Intel 100-series chipsets that will power personal computers based on the code-named Skylake microprocessors. As expected, Intel’s next-generation core-logic sets will support SATA Express as well as some other innovations. What is interesting is that the new chipsets will also support enhanced …

Intel's 9-series chipset saw the widespread adoption of high-speed storage connections operating via the PCI Express interface. While the 10Gbps transfer speeds of SATA Express and M.2 connections were a noticeable speed boost over the ageing SATA 6Gbps interface, they were still a far cry from the bandwidth offered by …

One of the most remarkable stories in the technology industry has been the rise of Asrock as a leading mainboard manufacturer. This company started life as an off-shoot from established manufacturers in 2002. At the start, it provided simple, low-cost alternative options for the system building sector of the PC …

Boards designed for extreme overclockers have been constants for all of Intel’s most recent platforms. Gigabyte hit success with the Z87X-OC motherboard by driving the overclocking-geared part to an aggressive mid-range price point. Many of the key overclocking-orientated features were still present, but the bank-busting price tag was not. Gigabyte …

Avago Technologies, the company, which agreed to sell its solid-state drive-related assets to Seagate earlier this year, announced plans to acquire PLX Technologies, a company which is widely known for its PCI Express bridges and switches used on multi-GPU graphics solutions as well as on sophisticated mainboards for enthusiasts. “The …

Taipei electronics firm Biostar has announced a new motherboard, this timing pushing not only its abilities when it comes to the office or the game room, but the depths of its bitcoin mine as well. The TB85 supports both 4th generation i7 and i5 CPUs and up to 16GB of DDR3 …

Officially, Intel Corp. allows overclocking of its X- and K-series microprocessors on mainboards based only on the X- and Z-series core-logic sets. However, from time to time the company and its partners make exceptions in a bid to allow more affordable overclocking. It looks like this may happen with the …

The PCI Express technology has served as the main standard for PC and server expansion slots for exactly ten years now and will probably be used for many years to come. Members of the PCI SIG [special interest group] reportedly agreed to double the bandwidth of the PCI Express 4.0 …

Asustek Computer on Friday announced a major promotion that it will be running together with Intel. From now on and until the 7th of July it will be possible to get up to £35 cash back when you purchase an Asus mainboard based on the Intel Z97 core-logic as well …

When Intel updated its Core models with the Sandybridge refresh, it turned its back on highly affordable overclocking – leaving that segment exclusively to AMD. The advent of the Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition looks to bring back at least one of these low cost options to fight with AMD. While …

After so many years of knocking out new processors with silky smoothness using its Tick-Tock production strategy, Intel's ‘Tick-ety-Tock' mis-step on Haswell has left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. All the more reason for the market to be interested in the X99 update – rumoured to …

One of the most popular sites at any technology show, is that of an expert overclocker pouring LN2 into a record breaking build. Gigabyte's suits in Taipai 101 was no different. KitGuru gets an introduction. To say that someone ‘ Wrote the book on overclocking', might sound like an overstatement. …

Founded in 1986, Gigabyte is one of the Taiwan Top 20 Global Brands, with a company motto that suggests you ‘Upgrade your life'. With four new ranges of boards coming into the market, we wanted to make sure we got a complete tour. Enter Nigel Sutch, regional sales and marketing …

Advanced Micro Devices reportedly plans to outsource development of its core-logic sets to Asmedia, a controller chip developer co-owned by Asustek Computer. While the plan may further reduce AMD’s costs and potentially will allow to quicker respond to market demands, it will also shrink AMD’s ability to offer fully-integrated platform …

Deep inside the huge Nangang Exhibition centre at Computex 2014 in Taipei, one corner of one stand was drawing significantly less power than its neighbours this year. KitGuru wondered watt was going on. Joran Schoonderwoerd, MSI product guru, was on hand to help explain. While the majority of the kit on show …

Modern solid-state drives often feature so high performance that even contemporary interfaces like the M.2 or the SATA Express (based on the PCI Express 2.0) cannot provide enough bandwidth for them. But Asustek Computer seems to have found a solution. At the Computex 2014 trade-show the company unveiled a special …

The DDR4 memory era is set to begin in several months from now. It is expected that the DDR4 standard will bring the world new performance heights thanks to increased memory frequencies and chip densities. But who said that the DDR3 cannot run faster? Hicookie, a well-known overclocker, this week …

Continuing our recent focus on gaming motherboards, we have the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7 in for review. Hitting retail with an aggressive sub-£140 price tag, Gigabyte is aiming to lure in potential buyers with the Gaming 7 motherboard's gaming-orientated features, striking colour scheme, and four-year warranty.  Fusing together the company's high-performance G1 Audio with …

The MSI A88X-G45 Gaming is a handsome AMD A88X motherboard that sports a long list of features including triple graphics slots. That explains the ‘Gaming' part of the name and as you would expect the A88X chipset means this MSI board supports the latest FM2+ range of Kaveri APU. There …

Perhaps, the first-generation SATA Express (SATAe) implementation that relies on the PCI Express 2.0 technology is not truly revolutionary and does not bring a dramatic performance boost compared to Serial ATA-6Gb/s. Nonetheless, SATAe is a part of the future, which is why companies like AMD need to support it in …

Sitting in the middle of ASRock's current Z97 gaming motherboard line-up, the Fatal1ty Z97X Killer targets the fierce sub-£130 marketplace. Can its feature set, overclocking capabilities, and general performance allow it to stand out in a hotly-contested segment of the market? ASRock supplies its Z97X Killer with a number of popular …

Sometimes mainboard makers come up with rather interesting solutions that truly leap performance of desktop personal computers forward by overcoming limitations of mainstream PC platforms. Unfortunately, in many cases elimination of one bottleneck just leads to creation of another… In a bid to boost performance of solid-state drives, Intel Corp. …

Its giveaway month! To celebrate Intel's recent launch of the Z97 platform we have another great competition for our readers – the chance to win one of three Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE motherboards! The Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE includes the usual high-end motherboard features like USB 3.0, HDMI and PCI-E slots, as …

Intel Corp. has officially unveiled its latest core-logic sets for desktop computers, the Z97 and H97. The new chips support all existing microprocessors in LGA1150 packaging that belong to the Haswell and Haswell Refresh families as well as the upcoming code-named Broadwell central processing units. The fresh platforms do not …

As you'd expect, with the advent of a new Intel chipset, every major computer brand is pushing through new ranges of systems that promise to be better, faster and more feature-rich than anything you've seen before. KitGuru casts an eye over the interwibble and picks out one such newbie. We …