by Rob Williams on June 16, 2008 in Trade Shows
In our last Computex article, I am taking a look at a slew of products from a few different companies that had a lot to offer, such as OCZ, Thermaltake, ECS, Gigabyte, Foxconn and others. Included is a look at numerous motherboards, video cards and even some power supplies.
Gigabyte surprisingly didn’t have too much new on display, but a few new products are worthy of mention. The most interesting to me personally was their GA-MA790GP ATX AMD motherboard. The 790G chipset includes integrated graphics that can be paired with Hybrid Crossfire, so Gigabyte upped the ante just a bit more.
Incorporated on board is 128MB of DDR3-1333 memory to be used exclusively with the integrated GPU. This will allow very fast memory access, although I’m unsure of real-world performance differences. I’m told they are quite noticeable, but it’s hard to judge just from specs only.
How about the GA-EP45 EX, which includes a massive copper heatsink? Again, I was told that the temperature decrease to be seen from this is rather sizable, and with something this large, I won’t be quick to discredit that claim.
For both the lower-end and early-adopters market, comes their P45 combo board, which I forget the exact name of. Like the GA-P35C we took a look at last year, this board can use both DDR2 and DDR3 (not at the same time), so you can use your current DDR2 now, and upgrade to DDR3 later if you so desire.
The last product I noticed was an Atom-based microATX board, one that offers a lot of performance in a very small package. The benefits of this system is somewhat obvious… good performance and a low power draw.
It’s even capable of displaying 1080p content, so you could truly build an incredibly small HTPC if you wanted to. Most people will prefer more power of course, but this is a good solution for those who believe smaller is better.