anilkumarr
Contributor
GIGABYTE’s Upcoming 7 Series Motherboards – Revelations from CES 2012
By Sourabh Shegaonkar, Power User, Mumbai
Like other motherboard manufacturers, GIGABYTE has showcased a few of their offerings in this year's CES. I can't say anything much about them now, we'll truly get to know about them only when they're launched along with Intel 22nm Next Gen processor.
Anyways, among the boards showcased, the Sniper obviously stands out. I personally love the color scheme. The interesting thing this board has is the new dual LAN controller and the Creative Sound 3D chip. I expect most motherboard manufacturers to start putting in dual LAN on not just the high end boards, but the mid-high end ones as well. I'd like to see how the new Creative chip performs in comparison to the Realtek onboard. Only 4 Sata 6gbps ports is a bit disappointing really. Intel should have been able to include more Sata 6gbps ports on the chipset since AMD already has it for a while. If not the chipset, maybe GIGABYTE could have added a couple more at least in their most high-end board at launch.
The Sniper M3 is another high end gaming motherboard. I personally am not a big fan of high end motherboards in mATX form factor. If I'm paying so much, I'd rather enjoy a better layout and more PCI lanes than getting a cramped mATX board. Still I think it's a good option for LAN gamers who need a smaller sized cabinet to carry around.
One thing GIGABYTE boards have is the mSata port. This is a very unique feature from GIGABYTE. However I hope they have mSata ports on all their boards, especially the lower/mid segment ones as well. With the mSata port one can just pop in a small sized SSD for a performance gain. However, I don't think most of the high end users will benefit much from this since they'll surely be spending on a standalone SSD which pretty much makes the mSata useless. I don't think you gain anything if you use an SSD in mSata if you already have an SSD installed. But the lower end users who can't afford larger sized SSDs will surely appreciate this.
Honestly I believe GIGABYTE seems to have lost a lot of enthusiast users with the Sandy bridge generation. I hope GIGABYTE can bring in some quality stuff with the Z77 series and give some serious competition to the other board manufacturers.
By Sourabh Shegaonkar, Power User, Mumbai
Like other motherboard manufacturers, GIGABYTE has showcased a few of their offerings in this year's CES. I can't say anything much about them now, we'll truly get to know about them only when they're launched along with Intel 22nm Next Gen processor.
Anyways, among the boards showcased, the Sniper obviously stands out. I personally love the color scheme. The interesting thing this board has is the new dual LAN controller and the Creative Sound 3D chip. I expect most motherboard manufacturers to start putting in dual LAN on not just the high end boards, but the mid-high end ones as well. I'd like to see how the new Creative chip performs in comparison to the Realtek onboard. Only 4 Sata 6gbps ports is a bit disappointing really. Intel should have been able to include more Sata 6gbps ports on the chipset since AMD already has it for a while. If not the chipset, maybe GIGABYTE could have added a couple more at least in their most high-end board at launch.
The Sniper M3 is another high end gaming motherboard. I personally am not a big fan of high end motherboards in mATX form factor. If I'm paying so much, I'd rather enjoy a better layout and more PCI lanes than getting a cramped mATX board. Still I think it's a good option for LAN gamers who need a smaller sized cabinet to carry around.
One thing GIGABYTE boards have is the mSata port. This is a very unique feature from GIGABYTE. However I hope they have mSata ports on all their boards, especially the lower/mid segment ones as well. With the mSata port one can just pop in a small sized SSD for a performance gain. However, I don't think most of the high end users will benefit much from this since they'll surely be spending on a standalone SSD which pretty much makes the mSata useless. I don't think you gain anything if you use an SSD in mSata if you already have an SSD installed. But the lower end users who can't afford larger sized SSDs will surely appreciate this.
Honestly I believe GIGABYTE seems to have lost a lot of enthusiast users with the Sandy bridge generation. I hope GIGABYTE can bring in some quality stuff with the Z77 series and give some serious competition to the other board manufacturers.
