Asus Rampage IV Gene X79 Motherboard Review

This is the latest X79 motherboard from Asus and by the looks of it this is a pretty amazing little board. It features a Micro-ATX form factor, but it comes with just about all of the bells and whistles that you’d find on a full size ATX board. It’s also in their ROG line of motherboards, so you know it’s meant to perform. So let’s have a look at the features of the chipset first and then we’ll go over the specific features of this motherboard.


Intel has made some rather significant improvements over their last generation of enthusiast level chipset. This new X79 chipset is meant to replace the venerable X58 chipset that has been so popular. This new chipset supports Intel’s latest 2011 socket processors that are manufactured using their latest 32nm manufacturing process.

When you look at one of these for the first time, you’ll notice that there is something very different about them. There are now ram slots located on both sides of the CPU socket. This has the effect of enabling the CPU to address memory across four channels instead of either two or three. There is a very good reason why these aren’t located on one side of the socket. If they were, this would increase latency between processor and ram depending on how much further the ram sticks were from the socket. So to solve this problem Intel put the ram slots on either side of the socket.

This chipset also uses Intel’s Express Platform Controller Hub technology. Intel has actually been using this technology for a while and what it does is it removes the need for two separate chips. AMD still uses a North Bridge and a South Bridge for their chipsets and Intel has been able to reduce this to just one. This is beneficial because it reduces temperatures and power consumption. During our testing the heat sink on this chipset never became too hot to touch. This is a dramatic improvement over the incredibly hot running X58 chipset. This should be beneficial to overclocking and overall performance.

These new boards also include support for the new PCIe 3.0 architecture. This effectively doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 and should eventually translate into better gaming and peripheral performance. There are hard drives that currently able to take advantage of the added bandwidth. This really won’t be completely supported until Intel’s next generation of processors becomes available though. Graphics cards aren’t going to be able to take advantage of the added bandwidth yet simply because they never maxed out the bandwidth from the previous generation of expansion slots. Once graphics cards become powerful enough to need the extra bandwidth though, these boards will be capable of providing it.

Exclusives

Well, the first feature is pretty obvious. This is a ROG (Republic Of Gamers) board that comes in a Micro-ATX form factor. That’s pretty amazing. This means that you can have pretty much the same performance and features of the full ATX board in a smaller form factor so that it will fit in more case and system configurations.

This board features SupremeFX III audio support that just sounds incredible. With the right speakers there is no question that this is some of the best integrated audio that you could buy. Everything sounds very realistic and crisp. There is no distortion when volume levels are turned up like you’d experience on most integrated audio solutions. This is due to the shielding that Asus has put over the chip to keep it from experiencing interference from the other components. This was very well thought out and it definitely makes a difference in terms of audio performance.

Now let’s talk about esthetics. This is one beautiful motherboard. It has the typical black and red ROG styling, which looks amazing. It features nicely designed black heat sinks for the MOSFETs and V-Regs. And even though it comes in such a small form factor it still has power and reset buttons located right on the board. There is even a Debug LED located at the top, right corner of the motherboard. You will also still get the usage of up to 4 dimms of memory even though this is a smaller form factor. You really need to see this board to believe it. Asus has crammed this board with just about every feature of their Formula version.

ROG Connect has become a very popular and useful feature of these boards. Essentially you have the ability to tweak your system via a connection between the motherboard and a laptop computer. You’ll be able to adjust your clock speeds and voltages, as well as monitor all of your settings and Post codes in real-time.  This is something you just have to see for yourself. It’s a truly amazing way to enhance your performance remotely, much the same way that racecar drivers tune their cars. There really isn’t anything else like it and it works really well. Just remember that you will need a separate system with an available USB port to take advantage of this feature.

This board comes with some really useful software as well. This board is bundled with a free version of DAEMON Tools Pro Standard that allows you to back up and manage all of your storage files. This is a great piece of software because it works with optical drives, hard drives, and virtual drives. There is also a full copy of Kaspersky Anti-Virus software with a one year license. Kaspersky is one of the most trusted names in the industry and another reason they were chosen for this board is because of its extremely low resource usage. For Asus to include such an amazing piece of software, for a year’s worth of service, is really cool. With this list of incredible features, Asus has ensured that this is going to be a very popular board for the enthusiast community.

Asus has also given this board a nicely populated rear I/O as well. It has a single PS2 keyboard and mouse combination port for those that are still using these legacy devices. Next to this is a clear CMOS button that will make it incredibly easy to clear your CMOS, without having to open your case. Situated next to this button is your S/PDIF out for connecting your motherboard to a digital audio device. Next this button is the ROG Connect button for enabling the usage of external ROG support. This button also works as a BIOS Flashback button as well, so that you don’t even need to have the system on to flash your BIOS. Next to this are three USB 2.0 ports and the ROG Connect port. Sitting next to these is your Intel Gigabit Ethernet port for LAN connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports. Next to these are an eSATA port and two USB 3.0 ports for Super Speed USB devices. Lastly, you’ll find your standard 7.1 analog audio connections.

Performance

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Gigabyte X79-UD5 Motherboard Review

We should first take a look at the features of this new chipset from Intel before we get into the specific features of this motherboard. This chipset is replacing the venerable X58 chipset that was extremely popular with the enthusiast community.


One of the main features of this new chipset is that it features support for Intel’s latest 2011 socket processors. These new processors are geared toward the enthusiast market and they are replacing Intel’s last enthusiast level processors, the 1366. These new processors deliver nearly server level performance and thus far have absolutely no rivals. 


This new chipset has some very interesting features and comes with a very unusual design. One of the first things that you’ll notice when you take one of these out of the box is that there are ram slots on both sides of the CPU socket. This is to enable support for Intel’s new memory architecture that uses four channels of memory. This is meant to boost performance by giving the processor better memory access. It also features support for memory speeds in excess of 2400MHz with overclocking and support for up to 64 gigs of installed memory. For the extreme enthusiast this is going to be really useful and for those that are into advanced media encoding this platform is going to be perfect.


A feature that Intel has added to this new chipset is their Platform Controller Hub technology. This isn’t really new for Intel, but is different than their competitor’s traditional design. What this technology does is it combines the traditional North Bridge and South Bridge into a single controller. This has the potential to reduce latency, boost performance, and reduce power requirements and overall temperatures. Intel’s previous enthusiast level chipset was notoriously hot and throughout our testing this controller never produced temperatures that made the heat sink hot to the touch. This new controller hub also features up to 40 PCI express 2.0 lanes and 8 lanes for PCI express 3.0. This new interface still needs to be paired with a processor and video card that supports it before it can be fully utilized.


Features

Now that we’ve covered the basic features of the new Intel X79 Chipset, let’s see what features Gigabyte have added to set this board apart from the competition.

This board comes with a BlueTooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi card for wireless connectivity with many of your wireless devices. This is a really great feature because it will make sinking up all of your wireless devices very simple and hassle free. The Wi-Fi card supports the latest 802.11n connectivity interface for up to 150 Mbps. Gigabyte has included these features for the convenience of their users and it shows that they understand that these are the types of features that help to set them apart from their competition.

Another feature that Gigabyte has added to this board is that it features support for their new 3-Way Digital Engine. This feature offers digitally precise control of your voltages for both of your memory channels, and your CPU. This is really important for enhancing overclocking potential and is something that enthusiasts will drool over. This feature will also offer the ability to set your own over voltage protection for your memory and precise Load-line Calibration to prevent Vdroop. With this level of precision control you are certain to be able to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your system.

This board also features Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 3 feature set. This feature set starts off with adding twice the normal amount of copper into the PCB. This has the potential of reducing temperatures, lowering EMI, and enhancing ESD protection. It also features the use of all Japanese solid capacitors for better overclocking and stability. This feature also adds ferrite core chokes to also enhance stability and power efficiency. These features have become very popular and are a major reason why Gigabyte has become such a popular brand. These features are also beginning to be used by more manufacturer’s for this same reason.


A really nice feature of this board is that it also supports 3-Way CrossFireX and 3-Way SLI. This is just what gamers and enthusiasts would want from a board like this. With this many graphics options there aren’t too many that would find this board to be anything other than perfect for their next major build. There aren’t that many that would even use this feature, but for those with the drive and wallet to do so it sure is a nice feature to have. It also means that future upgrades in the graphical department won’t be very difficult either. With most cards all you’ll need to do is add a second or third to boost your graphical performance.


Next in Gigabyte’s arsenal of features is their 3D Power Utility. This feature will give you a very easy to use graphical interface to control all of your motherboard performance settings. The first of these is Voltage Control. This will allow you to adjust all of your voltage settings so that you can reach your maximum overclocking potential. Second of these is Phase Control. This will allow you to set and calibrate your over current protection for your processor, integrated memory controller and your system memory power levels. Third in this lineup is their Frequency Control. This will allow for precise adjustment of your processor’s VRM to enhance power delivery. This can have dramatic effect on overclocking potential and system stability.


Gigabyte also offers support for their new 3D BIOS with these boards. This is one of the nicest graphical interfaces that we’ve seen for a BIOS of this type. It really is nice to see your motherboard with all of the various features mapped out for you. To find the area of the board that you want to enhance all you have to do is move your mouse over that particular area of the motherboard. It’s just that simple. If you want more precise controls you have their Advanced Mode as well. This is where you’ll find more advanced controls for overclocking and setting your voltages. Either way you will find exactly what you need by simply following the tabs at the top of the screen.


Gigabyte also offers their @BIOS utility with this board. This is one of the very best solutions for updating your BIOS over the internet. It is also one of the simplest to use. Of course this board also features a dual BIOS so that if you corrupt one you can always default to the backup to get your system up and running again. One thing that caused us some issues was Gigabyte’s Easy Tune6 utility for monitoring and overclocking. We could never really get it to work for this board and with many of the other boards that we’ve tested; this utility was spotty at best. Personally, I feel that you are much better off using your BIOS for overclocking than any included utility. Not only will your performance usually be better, but so will your stability.


his board also features support for Gigabyte’s Quick Charge technology and Dolby Home Theater audio. This Quick Charge technology is great because it can dramatically speed up the amount of time that it would normally take to charge your Apple device. Just be aware that there are some limitations with this technology when used with certain phones. Gigabyte’s Dolby Home Theater audio support produces some of the very best sounding integrated audio. There are those that will still want to opt for a dedicated sound card, but honestly the sound produced this this integrated audio solution is just amazing. You do need a really good set of speakers though to do it justice. Movies and games sound very realistic and music is very nicely reproduced. This is one of the best discrete audio solutions on the market.


Performance

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Upcoming 7-Series Motherboards

With Intel's next generation processors firmly on the horizon, we should also turn to what motherboards will be on offer when we have the opportunity to root around in our pockets to invest in an next generation system.  With appropriate vendor support, 6-series motherboards will support these new processors with little more than a BIOS update, however to get the most out of the new processor, we have to look at the new range of motherboards about to hit the market.  This brief look at some of them is by no means an exhaustive list, however we would like to know what you find most interesting and would like to be reviewed over the next few months.


7-Series Chipsets
As with all of Intel’s major chipset releases, we have the opportunity to pick from a wide range of models to suit different needs, price points, or even business models.  With Sandy Bridge, we also had distinct segregation – H67 had IGP but no overclocking, P67 did not have IGP but overclocked, and Z68 had both.  Thankfully this time all the new chipsets have IGP outputs to take advantage of the IGP, and the main differences lie in PCIe configuration limitations and use of Intel’s Smart Response Technology:

Chipset Comparison
	Z77	Z75	H77	Z68	P67	H67
CPU Support	IVB LGA-1155	IVB LGA-1155	IVB LGA-1155	SNB/IVB LGA-1155	SNB/IVB LGA-1155	SNB/IVB LGA-1155
CPU Overclocking	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
CPU PCIe Config	1 x16 or 2 x8 or 1 x8 + 2 x4 PCIe 3.0	1 x16 or 2 x8 PCIe 3.0	1 x16 PCIe 3.0	1 x16 or 2 x8 or 1 x8 + 2 x4 PCIe 3.0	1 x16 or 2 x8 PCIe 3.0	1 x16 PCIe 3.0
Processor Graphics Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Intel SRT (SSD caching)	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
RAID Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
USB 2.0 Ports (3.0)	14 (4)	14 (4)	14 (4)	14	14	14
SATA Total (Max Number of 6Gbps Ports)	6 (2)	6 (2)	6 (2)	6 (2)	6 (2)	6 (2)

The beauty of Ivy Bridge predominantly comes in the form of PCIe 3.0, which should alleviate many of the PCIe bus bandwidth bottlenecks in multi-GPU setups, and native USB 3.0 on board.  Some vendors may expand these features – PCIe lanes may be increased through a PCIe 3.0 PLX chip (similar to NF200 on X58), or third-party USB 3.0 controllers will be added to the boards.  In this brief look over some of the 7-series motherboards, we will see both in action.  However that PLX chip looks fairly expensive.

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Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Review

Hard disk capacities are growing at an ever-growing rate and the cost per gigabyte has gone down to the point where $99 can get you 2TB of storage space, that’s a mere 5 cents a gigabyte. This compares to the thousands of dollars you would have to spend on a hard disk 20 years ago, or several hundred dollars per gigabyte.  The reason costs have gone down is that the density for each platter on the hard drive has increased while the size of the drive has remained the same. Another factor is the advent of Solid State Drives for the mainstream user.

Western Digital has been making HDDs for a long time being one of the oldest consumer hard disk manufacturers and was one of the fist drive manufacturers to hit 1TB for consumer hard disks and 2TB of storage space. Today they are launching the first 3TB Hard Disk drives and to hit the market the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drive. This drive is retailing for $249, making it an interesting alternative for those wanting more storage space without paying the cost premium that a SSD would require.

The Western Digital 3TB HDD is a member of the 5^th generation of Caviar Green product line.  This drive has a capacity of 3000GB or 3 Terabytes which is pretty amazing.   The drive has four platters each of which contains 750GB of data storage capacity. The drive has a 64MB cache and is on the SATA II (3 Gb/second) interface.  As is usual with SATA drives, Native Command Queuing is supported.

One issue that manufacturers have with the increasing HDD space is that motherboards are using Master Boot Records and the system BIOS.  Hard Disk Drives generally have a 512 byte sector size which if you work out the math gives a maximum size of 2.19TB or 2 to the 32^nd power of storage space.  This is a hard limit and is similar to what happens when you try to install 4GB of memory into a system running 32-bit Windows.

One way to break the 2.19TB barrier is to use a larger sector size and keep the number of addressable blocks the same. Using a sector size of 4096 bytes would result to have up to 17.59TB of addressable space, which is 2 to the 32^nd power times 4096. The issue with doing that is applications are designed for sector sizes of 512 bytes and issues would occur with compatibility. Western Digital has transitioned some of their drives to using 4096 byte sized sectors with them emulating the 512 byte sectors to maintain compatibility.

WD and other computer related companies have begun releasing solutions to replace the MBR and the BIOS. The BIOS will be replaced in newer systems by something called UEFI which stands for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.  The replacement for the MBR is called GUID Partition Tables or GPT.  This transitions the storage partitions to 64-bit partitions for up to 18 Exabytes of Logical Block Addressing.  The problem here is that there are incompabilities with system BIOS and 3^rd party storage drivers, meaning that another solution needed to be found.

With few UEFI motherboards on the market, Western and Seagate had a choice, either find an interim solution to bridge the gap between the lacks of UEFI motherboards or wait until the boards reach enough saturation for them to be widely used.  Western Digital is bundling a HighPoint RocketRAID 620 card with their HDD to allow the users to address all 3TB of HDD space on the drive without it having a UEFTI to address 3TB instead of 2.19TB.  The card requires a free PCI Express x1 slot and acts as a Host Bus Adapter by enabling boot support for 64-bit operating systems such as Apple’s OSX 10.5, Windows 7 64-bit or Linux.

The 3.0TB Caviar Green HDD arrived in a plain brown box. Inside the box the HDD was bundled with two plastic end pieces to ensure no damage was done to the HDD in transit. Also included was the HighPoint RocketRAID PCI Express card to enable this drive to work with the larger capacity on motherboards without UEFI.

The drive itself is the same size and shape as the 1TB and 2TB drives from Western Digital. In point of fact if you look at two drives from the Caviar Green family of 1TB or 3TB visually there is little difference. The top of the drive has the Part Number and Serial Number sticker with the various bits of information on the drive there. The back of the drive has the SATA Power and Data ports plus jumpers for Master/Slave. The sides have three holes for mounting the drive into a 3.5” drive bay.

 Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Performance

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Kingston SSDNow KC100 120GB SSD Review

Solid State drives are definitely one of the hottest computer products in the market now. And every day it just feels like they are getting more affordable for consumers to buy them. As we all know with technology and time, products that were once expensive are much cheaper after a period of time. Not only are they cheaper, but they work a lot faster and better than their previous models. All the first gen SSDs really did not have much more read and write speeds faster than a normal hard drive. However, the increase in boot time was very attractive since there was no need for spin up time like original mechanical hard drive. Enthusiasts would use a 30 to 40 GB SSD to boot their computer and have a normal hard drive for storage. The only drawback was that there was not much longevity for the SSD since the free space left over was becoming smaller and smaller due to other extra files (windows update, internet cache, hidden files, etc…). This worked quite well until companies started focusing on increasing the size, speed, and integrity of these drives simultaneously.

Nowadays we can see 90-120 GB SSDs with amazing transfer rates, safety options, longer life times, and affordable prices. The product that I will be reviewing today is more on the business end since it comes with extra features to really protect the integrity of your information. But, it should be noted it’s still pretty affordable in terms of the price of SSDs. Kingston has come out with their SSDNow KC100 120GB SSD drive that blows away the competition. It’s fast, sleek, simple, and will definitely protect your information should your drive fail. Let’s take a look and see what comes inside the box of this amazing SSD.

Package Contents

• Kingston SSDNOW KC100 120GB SSD
• 2.5’’ USB Enclosure
• 3.5’’ Brackets and Mounting Screws
• SATA Power and Data Cable
• Hard Drive Cloning Software with Installation Guide

DuraClass is basically the main technology behind this that represents a set of flash management features that work together in order to optimize reads and writes that occur with the drive. And DuraWrite optimizes the number of program cycles that the flash memory induces in order to optimize performance and reliability in the drive. These two features together help make your SSD not only work better but also last longer. If you use your SSD as your boot drive, the computer will not run again if the drive fails. So you have to take every precaution you can in order make sure your computer’s information stays intact.


Now I haven’t heard much about their RAISE technology but so far I can deduce that it caters to reducing error bit rates from SSDs. The one consistent way to prevent drive failure is to make sure the drive not have too many data error reads. And this is exactly what this technology target. RAISE will definitely allow your SSD to run smoothly and efficiently while you work or play the night away.


KC100 Performance

The performance of this SSD is just amazing. I tested various SSDs and a regular hard drive in order to gauge just how much faster this drive is compared to others. There are other SSDs with faster speeds that I could have tested with but I wanted to show a comparison of basically regular hard drives, first gen SSDs, second gen SSDs, and current SSDs.

The tests above clearly show the difference between SSDs nowadays and SSDs back then. It was amazing fast with large files and large quantities of small files as well. And with the added data protection that comes with the Kingston SSDNow KC100 120GB SSD, it will be a tough competitor to beat.

Now the biggest reason for getting an SSD for your computer, boot up time. For most people they know that there computer boots up pretty slow with a regular hard drive. I clocked mine at around 2 minutes and 6 seconds. This could be different for laptops and netbooks but for desktops that time I think is pretty reasonable. Looking at the scores below its easy to see that there is just no comparison between a hard drive and an SSD. But, this test shows that higher transfer rates in SSDs did not increase boot up times. We roughly got around the same time for the Intel SSD and Kingston SSD. It really wasn’t that far off. The extra transfer speeds help when loading applications and transferring files, but does not aid the boot up time too significantly.

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