An interview with Gigabyte's Andrew Ditchburn
With the launch of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge chipset, component manufacturers have been positioning themselves to make the most of this new technology. Matt Grainger talks to Gigabyte’s Andrew Ditchburn about the new range of X79 devices.
What products has Gigabyte got lined up for the X79 chipsets?
Currently we’ve got the X79 UD3, which is our entry level board, then we’ve got the X79 UD5, which is more of the all-singing, all-dancing kind of board. Then after that we’ve got the X79 UD7, which is the high-end over- clocking product and then there’s the Assassin 2, which is the gaming product so it’s designed with gamers in mind. It’s got the flashy heatsinks and things like that, as well as creative audio and networking and so on.
So there’s quite a comprehensive line-up then...
Yeah, the aim is that we really wanted the main four to push. We’ll probably have more models next year, but these will be our focus models for 2011.
So what marks X79 out from its predecessors?
Quad memory channel support is one of the main things from that point of view. Then what Intel has done is take the Sandy Bridge architecture from current CPU’s and adapted it so that the new i7’s, which are 2011 pin, will completely replace the 1366 socket X68 chipsets.
So are you first to market with these?
I’d love to say yes, but no. We’ve been there from the launch of X79 but it’s a competitive market, so our competitors are there as well.
Okay, so what has Gigabyte brought to the table?
Well the main thing is 3D power and 3D BIOS. Intel creates the chipset and we like to take that and innovate on it. The 3D power allows the user to use digital PWM on the motherboard. The reason it’s 3D is because you’ve got one PWM for one bank of the memory, another for the other bank and a third one for the CPU itself. This will deliver more stable power to the components, which should result in better overclocking results.
That’s a new development isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s fairly new. Some people use PWM on CPU’s but it’s never been standard. We’ll be putting it on our X79’s and hopefully rolling it out to other products over time.
So they’re future-proofed?
Yeah, we’ve also made the board PCI Gen3, which is something that the X79 boards don’t have native support for, so once that comes out our boards will already be able to handle it.
So what are the unique selling points?
We have 3D Power and 3D BIOS, which are unique to us. I’ve mentioned the digital PWM, but with 3D BIOS you can use the mouse and keyboard to click on a 3D image of the motherboard to adjust various settings without having to work through the traditional text-based BIOS menus.
What we’ve tried to do is create an all-in-one BIOS that’s directly aimed at people who are new to the system and who might not necessarily know what they’re doing. It means they can explore their settings and overclock if they want.
So it’s an alternative interface?
Yeah, it’s based on the UEFI system, which has been around for a while. So it’s increasingly an industry standard but the 3D BIOS GUI is unique to us. We’ve done our best to make it very user-friendly and open it up to more people. It’s a point and click interface but more experienced users can use the old style interface if they want.
We’ve also introduced integrated Bluetooth 4.0, which is futureproofed and designed to be as user friendly as possible, but we also have more traditional features like four-way SLI and CrossfireX.
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