System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Performance Midrange
Many things have changed in the nine months since our last midrange system guide hit the press, some for the worse—a moment of silence, please, for the passing of yesteryear’s RAM bonanza—but most for the better. ATI in particular deserves a nod for raising the bar for single-chip graphics card performance with its Cypress line (and, more recently, NVIDIA for its Fermi parts). All told, a ~$1700 complete system (~$1200 for the base) built around the i5-750 or one of AMD's Phenom II CPUs promises to deliver better performance than last year’s entry in most applications and beat it soundly in gaming and other graphics intensive tasks, all in spite of today’s significantly greater cost per GB of RAM.
As usual, we'll have both AMD and Intel recommendations today, with a common set of shared components. The story hasn't changed much when comparing AMD vs. Intel. You can get more cores at a lower price with AMD, but Intel will give you higher performance at the same clock speed (and generally higher clock speeds) along with lower power consumption. If you're looking to build a new midrange system, our latest Buyer's Guide will provide the help you need.
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Gigabyte announce their new flagship motherboard: The X58A-UD9
Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9.
In terms of board features, you get support for 6-core Gulftown processors, 4 way SLI and Crossfire X across 7 PCI-E 2.0 slots using 2 NF200 chips (for x16, x8, x16, x8, x16, x8, x16 lanes), support for tri-channel DDR3-2200+ memory, onboard buttons for power, reset and clear CMOS, 2x Realtek Gigabit ethernet connectors, 2x SATA 6Gb/s connectors using the newest Marvell controller, and 2 USB3 connectors.
Unsurprisingly, Gigabyte are also marketing their own specific motherboard standards: DualBIOS, allowing for BIOS backup protection; Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 design for heat conductance across the chipset and VRMs such that a fan is not needed (however connectors are provided for water cooling); and a hardware control IC for precision voltage control. Gigabyte’s penchant for high phase counts also rears its head in the form of a ’24 phase’ VRM (current handling capabilities are unknown to us at present). Also of note is the On/Off Charge support, allowing USB devices to be powered by certain USB ports when the motherboard is powered down - Gigabyte can utilise this by supplying 3x more power to these USB ports.
The board is obviously aimed at enthusiasts wanting to break overclocking records. There's no word on price, but it's most likely to be more expensive than the EX58-Extreme, which currently retails at a $349 minimum.
If this board comes our way, we'll let you know how it performs.
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News Just In: No Phenom II X4 960T for general release?
As a follow up to the news of new AMD processors covering various price points, our contact over at AMD has provided the following information:
"While there are indeed engineering CPU samples floating around of a 4-core Thuban 960T, I do not expect that processor will be released for general availability. Perhaps it may make its way to OEMs by special request, but that remains to be seen."
This is, to us, interesting news. A lot of AMD motherboard manufacturers have jumped on the core unlocking bandwagon, so that processors that are manufactured with more processors but have some turned off due to defects or to fill cheaper price points can potentially be unlocked. Thus any processor built on a quad core process but retails with three cores, could potentially have another core unlocked - such as the Phenom II X3 720 could be unlocked to the Phenom II X4 920. But, unlocking cores is a function of the processor itself - given the close price points of all the unlockable processors, it has always been suggested that you should by the processor you want, rather than the potential of unlocking cores which may or may not be possible.
The theory has been that new quad cores may be released using AMDs six-core Thuban design, with the first product being called the Phenom II X4 960T. Due to the motherboard manufacturers, it has also been known that this quad core processor could be unlocked to the full six cores if the silicon allows it. However, given the statement above by AMD, no 960T may be seen at retail.
Various vendors currently have access to engineering samples of the Phenom II X4 960T, and with a quick blast on Google there are cases of unlocking both cores presented. However, this means little to the system builder that wants six cores on the cheap, if it can only be obtained by OEMs.
If there is no 960T at retail, what can we expect? We have little doubt that quad core processors based on six core dies will go on general release at some point this year - it would be an opportunity that AMD couldn't miss. However, we may have to wait until Q3 or Q4 this year to see the products.
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Announcing: HP 4320t Mobile Thin Client
HP has announced their latest notebook, which they claim is ideal for business users requiring mobile access to server-based, virtual PC or blade PC computing. Dubbed the 4320t Mobile Thin Client, the system features an Intel Celeron processor with preinstalled software aimed at the business user, all packaged in a sleek brushed aluminum chassis.
The 4320t runs Windows Embedded Standard 2009, as opposed to a traditional Windows OS. It also comes with a 2GB or 4GB solid state flash module as the primary storage. Performance won't be record setting but it should be faster than the last generation CULV laptops. It uses a Lynnfield-based Celeron P4500 running at 1.8GHz with 2MB L2, so it should be plenty fast for typical business workloads.
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