Event Coverage

CeBIT Hannover 2007 (Part 3)

By Vijay Anand - 17 Mar 2007

More New Gigabyte Motherboards & Graphics Cards

More New Gigabyte Motherboards & Graphics Cards

 Up till today, Gigabyte has only launched the nForce 680i motherboard of the nForce 600i series. However, in a matter of a few weeks, you should be able to see the nForce 650i based GA-N650SLI-DS4 motherboard.

 Like most other manufacturers, motherboards supporting AMD processors are seeing momentum in the mid and low-end range only for reasons of the CPU's caliber at the moment. This GA-MA69G-S3 is an AMD 690G motherboard that has a Radeon X1250 graphics core, sports FireWire, Gigabit, 8-channel HD Audio and SATA 3Gbps. For those interested to upgrade the graphics subsystem in the long run, there's not only a PCIe x16 slot but also a PCIe x4 open-ended slot, which together support ATI's CrossFire.

 Here's micro-ATX cousin, the GA-MA69VM-S2, but this is based on the AMD 690V chipset, hence a slower Radeon X1200 based graphics engine.

 Here's a competing product based on the NVIDIA chipset. The GA-M68SM-S2 uses the new NVIDIA GeForce 7025/nForce 630a combination (single-chip). It has DVI output with HDCP compliance right at the back of its I/O panel. Other features like HD audio, FireWire and Gigabit LAN are expected features of its class.

 On the graphics side, we spotted an all-passive Radeon X1650 graphics card with 256MB – the GV-RX165256D-RH.

 Here's a new Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS with 512MB. However, what's interesting is its new Silent-Pipe II cooling solution, which differs from the Silent-Pipe II cooling we've seen thus far. Gigabyte briefed us that this is a lower cost version using all aluminum and doesn't eat up the adjacent expansion slot, but still used the same technology level; thus the same feature naming. Cooling performance isn't to the level of the original version, but it will suffice for the low-end cards. Now SFF owners have another choice to consider.

 The next Silent-Pipe revision is revealed as well and from what Gigabyte has relayed, we can expect it to be paired with next month's mid-range GeForce 8600/8500 debut.

 Also on display at Gigabyte's booth is a DDR3 demo system using the GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard with Qimonda DDR3 memory operating at 1333MHz DDR (although the RAM itself can operate at up to 1.6GHz).

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