Gigabyte GA-EP55-UD4P Preview

First seen at Computex 2009, P55 chipset-based motherboards have been showing up in sneak peaks everywhere. So on that count, OCC is delivering a quick look at an upcoming board to be used with the Intel Core i5 "Lynnfield" mainstream processors. A new CPU often times means a new socket and this time is no different, as the socket pin count on the i5 will be 1156 versus 1366 on the i7. So what else is new on the i5? Intel has chosen to move away from the tri-channel memory design and stick with a dual-channel design. Just a couple of things that appear to be a way to bring down the entry costs on an Intel-based system. Since much is still up for speculation, let's take a quick trip around one of the boards that Gigabyte has put together for the upcoming platform.

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MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Motherboard Review

Wow, another AMD motherboard review at Hardware Canucks? You bet. With the great performance-to-dollar ratio that AMD’s new Phenom II has brought to the table, there has been a huge resurgence of interest in AMD products. Even the enthusiast crowd has taken a second look at AMD’s Phenom II thanks to its great overclocking headroom and AMD’s tweaker-friendly “Black Edition” processors.Today we’re going to be taking a look at one of MSI’s higher-end socket AM3 motherboards; the 790FX-GD70. Unlike many of the mainstream 790GX platform offerings, the GD70 employ’s AMD’s top-end, enthusiast offering; the 790FX/SB750 chipset combo. Although the 790FX is a discrete graphics solution and doesn’t include AMD’s very capable HD 3300 integrated graphics processor, it gets quite an army of PCI-Express lanes in exchange. MSI has certainly taken advantage of these available lanes and implemented – yes you heard it right – four PCI-E slots for Quad-Crossfire-X support. Although Quad-Crossfire is a pretty ludicrous proposition even for hardcore gamers, we’ve most certainly got the attention of our Folding@Home community, haven’t we?When it comes to features, the GD70 is a “well equipped” board. Aside from the four full-length PCI-E slots, it also features eight SATA ports, dual-gigabit LAN ports, E-SATA, Firewire and an elaborate passive cooling solution. The GD70 also has some very “green” features under its belt, like the “Active Phase Switching” feature that allows its voltage regulation phases to be cut down when not required to conserve electricity. Targeted toward the AMD enthusiast community, MSI has included a very flexible BIOS with the GD70, very numerous and generous voltage adjustments, onboard switches, labelled voltage read-points and even a dial for increasing reference clocks on the fly. To put it plainly, the GD70 looks like one impressive AM3 board on paper.Let’s see if it lives up to its paper hype in the HWC labs!

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Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB Review

Since 2007, when Sapphire released the HD3870 Atomic that was reviewed here on OCC, the company has used the Vapor change cooling concept to cool just about all of its upper end enthusiast grade video cards. The one exception that comes to mind is the HD4870x2 Atomic that was water cooled. By using this cooling solution and using better parts, Sapphire's top end cards have that extra little bit in the tank when it comes to cooling and overclocking potential when compared to the reference cards.

The Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB model is basically the 1GB model with an additional 1GB of GDDR5 memory to try and help out on the top end resolutions. The clock speeds remain identical at 870MHz on the 55nm RV790 core and 1050MHz on the not one but two gigabytes of GDDR5 memory. If the 2GB uses the same Quimonda memory that is rated for 1000MHz, I would expect the overall performance and overclocking to be very similar. Will the extra memory memory on the HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB make a difference in performance or will it just be an added bonus to help with a bit of future proofing? Will it be harder to overclock with the extra memory? Questions that definitley need answering as I have seen more than one post in forums asking just that question. Let's find out!

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Corsair TX850 850W Power Supply Review

Like all of you, we here at Hardware Canucks love getting our greedy little hands on the newest, highest-end products on the market. Fortunately for consumers and much to the detriment of our obscenely-priced hardware fetish, the market is rife with affordable products which cater to those of us who don’t want to spend a fortune on one piece of hardware. For many that means ignoring the latest and greatest products and instead concentrating on units that have been on the market for a while and as such are priced far below their original cost. This perfectly sound outlook towards component buying is what led us to request one of Corsair’s older yet very competitively priced power supplies for review: the TX850. Back when it was first released about a year ago, the TX850 was the next logical step for Corsair to take on their march towards market domination. They didn’t have a power supply to challenge the 800W to 900W units being released by other manufacturers and needed a stepping stone between the HX620 and HX1000. At it stands, the TX850 is now supplemented by a number of higher end units including the modular HX850 and budget conscious products such as the CX400. Through all of this, Corsair has kept the TX850 appealing by gradually decreasing its price while maintaining the same great customer service and warranty consumers have come to love. Like it or not, the market between the 700W and 900W segments is cluttered with power supplies of every shape, size, quality and price. Corsair has distinguished themselves as being the go-to company for power supplies these days because of one main reason: people know that when they buy a Corsair power supply they’re getting quality. Sure, the 5-year warranty and great customer support are reasons as well but a stringent qualification process means every unit from Corsair is expected to meet the same high standards. This in itself has made their PSUs some of the most popular on the market. We can talk about popularity and potential performance all we want but what we are here for today is to see if this year-old power supply is still able to live up to our expectations. With an average price of around $140CAD and having been on sale for around $120CAD (with a mail in rebate) at times, the TX850 could be just what the doctor ordered for people who need a high end product at a bargain price.

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MSI N275GTX Twin Frozer OC Review

When the time comes to buy a video card we all have our "wants" that are tempered with our "needs". This usually comes down to the price we ultimately put as the limit for the purchase. Many times the "needs" will win out with some reasoning and we buy a model just lower than we want. Then we will spend additional money to make improvements to the cooling to try and overclock to reach a higher level of performance for the dollars we spent. What if a manufacturer has added a cooler that was capable of meeting the cooling needs right out of the box with a price tag that was reasonable? Would you allow the "want" to override the "need", since you already have plans for additional cooling? If so MSI has you covered with the MSIN275GTX Twin Frozer OC! This card comes with a massive heatpipe based cooling solution that uses 5 large heatpipes to reduce the operating temperature of the GPU as well as the rest of the heat generating components. On top of that, the card has been given a bit of a performance increase by way of a reasonable overclock to 666MHz on the GPU core, 1476MHz on the shaders and 1161MHz on the 890MB of GDDR3 memory. With the cooling and overclock the Twin Frozer looks to have some serious performance credentials. Let's see if the performance manages to live up to the look!

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ASUS ENGTX275 Review

When the dual-PCB GTX 295 debuted back in January, you knew right away that nVidia was more than likely going to make a card that fell between the GTX 280 and GTX 260 to capture that price and performance point. If it was not obvious, you just were not thinking hard enough! Lo and behold, April 2, 2009 the GTX 275 made its debut at a price point below that of the GTX 280/285, offering performance almost on par with it and meant to compete with ATI's HD4890 launched at the same time. Coincidence? I think not! But here we are two months later with ASUS's rendition of the GTX 275.

The ASUS ENGTX275 is a combination of the GTX 260 and GTX 280, using 240 shader cores under the heatspreader from the GTX 280 and 896MB of GDDR3 memory running on a 448-bit BUS straight from the GTX 260. Clock speeds on this ASUS variant are the stock clock speeds of 633MHz on the core, 1404MHz on the shader processors and 1134MHz on the memory. One thing the ASUS variant features is the use of their "Ultimate Armaments". These "armaments" are basically components used to improve on the reference design and provide a video card that can run cooler, longer and more efficiently. Let's take a look and see if the ENGTX275 construction is a benefit and whether or not it allows for more overclocking than the reference design.

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Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler Review

It certainly has been a long, long time since we looked at HDT (Heatpipe Direct Touch) based cooling solutions. The last one we looked at was from OCZ and was essentially a tweaked clone of the Xigmatek S1284. Since then, many air coolers have come and gone…but one thing has remained constant: the three HDTs we have reviewed are still near the top of our charts and are easily some of the best bang for the buck coolers out there. Today we look at another HDT-based solution, one that is poised to upset the Xigmatek / OCZ apple cart and bring in a new reigning king of the budget coolers. The heatsink we are talking about is the brand new Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus. While a relative new comer to this whole HDT game, Cooler Master is not new to the Air Cooling arena. In the past we have looked at numerous Cooler Master cooling products, all of which had their pros and cons but lacked the HDT feature we really wanted. Well, it appears we are not alone in bemoaning this fact as the new Hyper 212 PLUS is one which not only incorporates HDT but allows for “out of the box” dual 120mm fan cooling. The Hyper 212 PLUS is brand new so finding one in the wild may prove to be a challenge right now. Knowing Cooler Master, this situation will change quickly and it should come in at about $40 here in Canada, and be widely available from retailers and e-tailers alike everywhere. Just give it a few more weeks. This cooler really does have a lot of expectations riding on it as it does appear to have the potential to dethrone the OCZ Vendetta 2 / Xigmatek S1283 as our reigning value kings and become our “go to” cooler we would recommend to anyone (regardless of budget) who is not ready to get their feet wet in the water cooling arena. Heck, the just recently crowned Prolimatech Megahalems may have some stiff competition for its kingdom as we think the true and full HDT potential has never been fully tapped by any cooler yet. Can this one do it?

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OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Review

Recently we had the pleasure to review the G.Skill Falcon SSD and walked away pretty impressed. By what some would call a cruel twist of fate, we reviewed the last generation of drives by G.Skill (the Titan) and its OCZ counterpart (the OCZ Apex) in a one-two fashion. As with most things in life, the truth is stranger than fiction as less than a week after receiving the Falcon SSD, OCZ approached us to review their Vertex. Since we so thoroughly enjoyed testing and using the Falcon, we decided that the fates had preordained this and gladly accepted the offer. In the last go around, we found both the Titan and Apex drives to be vastly improved upon the previous generation but still hobbled by J-Micron controllers. In this generation neither the Falcon nor Vertex drive suffer from that hobbled controller and are supposed to make for a very persuasive argument against an Intel X-25M. As we mentioned in the Falcon review the original Vertex series did ship with an earlier version of Indilinx DX110 controller in this particular drive, this may be the same as saying an i7 920 D0 is the same as a i7 920 C0/C1 stepping. Honestly, it may just be a big enough a difference to differentiate them come crunch time. Of course, we also mused that OCZ probably had also moved over to the newer revision of the Indilinx controller and we will be paying close attention to this and any other developments which pop up. To keep things as up to date as possible, the very first thing we will do is make sure this Vertex is running the newer 1.3 firmware and not an earlier version. By the same token we will not be running any later beta firmware and will stick to “official firmware”. The Vertex goes for about $393 and is available in retailers and e-tailers alike, though we have seen it on sale for less recently. As with the last OCZ drive we reviewed, the biggest question does concern Value. We already know how good the Indilinx controller is and we know that in theory the Vertex 120 should perform a lot like the Falcon as the 1.3 firmware revision is more about bug fixes rather than performance enhancements. Will this OCZ Vertex meet and exceed our expectations or will it be hard to justify going with the original when other competition’s versions of basically the same SSD are a better value? We will endeavor to do our best to answer these and many other questions in this review.

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ASUS Crosshair III Formula Review

When it comes to overclocking, one requires only the best components, including processors, memory and, of course, motherboards. With motherboards, there are so many chipsets to choose from that a lot of trial and error comes into play when picking the correct one for you. As an enthusiast, I push the limits of my hardware to squeeze every bit of juice out of them that I can. When it comes to AMD processors, such as the Phenom II X4 955, I found the AMD 790FX/SB750 chipset to be the most stable for achieving high overclocks. One manufacturer has taken a proven enthusiast platform and designed a board around the 790FX/SB750 chipset for those yearning high benchmarks, such as our readers at OCC.

ASUS has had a sub-brand called the Republic of Gamers for some time now and designs its products to be the finest products available to gamers, according to ASUS. Its line includes both motherboard and video cards that are built to be the best. One of the series aimed at AMD users from ASUS is the ROG Crosshair series, which traditionally were built using nVidia chipsets. However, for the third board in the series, ASUS opted for the 790FX chispet with its proven stability and speed. The Crosshair III Formula also adds special features that set it apart from other 790FX based boards, which we will see inside.

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ASUS Maximus II GENE P45 mATX Motherboard Review

All the way back in February, ASUS introduced the world to the latest addition to the Republic of Gamer (RoG) family of motherboards in form of the GENE series. The first model to be announced and released was the Rampage II GENE, an Intel X58-based microATX model that we had an opportunity to review. In mid-April, the second model in the series was revealed to be the Maximus II GENE, an LGA775 motherboard which sports the mainstream P45 chipset and is also based on the compact mATX form factor. This is the board we will reviewing for you today. The Maximus II GENE is targeting case modders, LAN gamers, and just about anyone who enjoys having a more compact system but who doesn't want to give up anything in the form of performance, multi-GPU support, overclocking, etc. Let's face the facts, aside from the DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS, all microATX motherboards on the market are quite boring, budget-oriented models with very little appeal to those who want compact but high-performance systems. The MIIG, as we will occasionally refer to it from now, certainly does come packed to the gills for an mATX board, featuring two physical PCI-E x16 2.0 (8x electrical) slots, one PCI-E x1 slot, one PCI slot, seven SATA-II ports, one Gigabit LAN port, six USB 2.0 ports, eSATA and FireWire connectivity, an 8-channel HD SupremeFX X-Fi audio codec, diagnostic LEDs, onboard power/reset buttons, a heatpipe cooling system, etc. What really distinguishes the Maximus II GENE from almost every other LGA775 mATX on the market is CrossFireX capability, a 8-phase PWM for the CPU, dual-channel DDR2-1300 support, an overclocking-oriented BIOS, Loadline Calibration (LLC), and TweakIt LCD Poster. That is not even mentioning the wide range of proprietary ASUS features like CPU Level Up and MemOK! and worthwhile software tools like PC Probe II and TurboV. So clearly, on paper everything is in place for this to be the best microATX motherboard on the market for the enthusiast crowd. Can it live up to these lofty expectations? Let's find out!

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ASUS EAH 4770 Formula Series Review

What you have with the ASUS EAH4770 Formula is another rendition of the first 40nm video card to the market. On the outside the Formula 4770 at first glance looks like a standard HD 4770 with a special heatsink but when you look a little deeper there is more to be seen. This card is smaller than all of the behemoth video cards on the market at just over eight inches in length. The depth of the heatsink makes the Formula series 4770 a dual slot cooling solution. Along the top edge of the card there is a brace to provide additional rigidity to the PCB to prevent any droop of the PCB like I have seen on some HD4850s over time. That fix is always a welcome addition. When building its latest video cards, ASUS has made some improvements that should help with the reliability as well as reducing operating temperatures of the on board components while running more efficiently. In today's economy not everyone has the financial ability to upgrade at any time and are looking for their hardware to last for a greater length of time. ASUS call these the "Ultimate Armaments." What you get are lower RDS(on) MOSFETs, solid capacitors, shielded video outputs and covered chokes. As you can see in the slide below each has a significant impact. The fan used on the Formula 4770 features a double seal that helps keep dust out of the motor increasing its life span by a large margin. This, of course, will take some testing time but with the dust that seems to accumulate in my computers this should be something easy to do. Having the fan fail on even a mid range performance card can have a devastating effect on the GPU and memory.

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