1DAY, Clare, from UK is the best overclocker in the country and arguably the best female overclocker in the world. She looks to be finally honing in on the top Core i7 2600K overclocks on HWBOT with an impressive bunch of results at 5.7GHz+ taking some world records as well for good measure. Her benching board is the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7! Well done and keep pushing it!

HWBOT crew might have some explaining to do calling UK’s best overclocker an “OC King” when in fact it should be an “OC Queen” heheh.

Xtremesystems has been buzzing with Sandy Bridge release and it seems GIGABYTE P67 boards are helping guys hit monster overclocks. Eldonko from Canada just put up a thread benchmarking past 5.7Ghz and getting very close to 5.8Ghz OC using the flagship P67A-UD7, WOOOOOW! Check it out here!

I am really loving this new OC action and it’s nice to see Eldonko and others doing so well with new platform.

Tweaktown is running a flood appeal by giving away a fantastic Sandy Bridge based system worth around US$5,000. Naturally GIGABYTE Australia wanted to help and donated our top of the line P67A-UD7 board.

Please visit this Tweaktown link to find out how to donate via a $10 raffle to this appeal and help all Australians who suffered from this terrible natural disaster.

It's been a little delayed due to securing parts, but we are very happy and proud to announce TweakTown's Aussie Flood Appeal Dream System!

As many of you would know, much of the state of Queensland in Australia was devastated by one of the worst natural disasters in the country's history - it is being compared to the tragic Cyclone Tracy of 1974 which flattened 80% of Darwin's houses. The clean-up bill for the Aussie floods is expected to hit at least FOUR BILLION DOLLARS and it will take years to fully recover. People have lost everything, their homes are gone and towns have been completely destroyed.
We have some teamed up with some of our closest technology company friends and rounded up some of the hottest new products on the market to build the TweakTown Aussie Flood Appeal Dream System. Currently the system is valued at $4871.81 USD (based on Newegg price where applicable), but keep in mind that value will only increase as we adding some extras such as Windows OS, games, monitors and anything else that comes our way from kind companies who are getting involved with this project.

Without further ado, the Dream System consists of the following parts so far: (Jan 26, 2011)
- Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz CPU (donated by AVADirect)
- GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD7 Motherboard

Anybody in the world can enter. You will not need to pay the huge shipping bill because our lovely friends over at Thermaltake signed on to be our "shipping sponsor" and cover that bill!

Last week I wrote about the new X58A-OC board we have coming out soon and showed the IO panel and thought I’d follow it up with some more features. This one is pretty neat as you can see in the photo.

We are providing some extra ports to power the PCI Express slots when you run 3-4x SLI/XFIRE. In the past you would see boards like ours using molex connectors in some obscure places on the board that are frankly hard to reach and a touch tricky when it comes to insulation. This new layout will help make easier to provide the extra power without needing to route cables in the middle of the board.

You can see we are providing both SATA2 and SATA3. We are trying to keep it as lean and mean as we can without sacrificing some reasonable functionality. I’ll see what other photos I can dig out and put it up soon. Stay tuned!

All GIGABYTE P67 and H67 chipset motherboards produced today ship with GIGABYTE’s Hybrid EFI Technology, and we have started porting this new BIOS to other chipset platforms with the intention to make it available on every currently shipping GIGABYTE motherboard. You’ll see the statement below start to appear on various online forums around the web as we start to promote this unique new GIGABYTE feature.

DualBIOS™ 3TB+ HDD Support (Hybrid EFI Technology)

3TB+ HDD support is an essential new feature for 2011 and has been one of the most talked about technologies accompanying the launch of the new Socket 1155 6 series motherboards. GIGABYTE not only supports booting from 3TB+ HDDs on all new P67 and H67 chipset motherboards, we offer the ability to boot from 3TB+ HDDs on all currently shipping GIGABYTE motherboard models (from high-end X58 chipset models down to the entry level new G41 chipset models) through GIGABYTE’s unique Hybrid EFI Technology. Hybrid EFI Technology combines the benefits of GIGABYTE’s mature BIOS platform including stability and compatibility with 3^rd party products with 3TB+ HDD support from EFI technology, allowing GIGABYTE to offer the best of both worlds through a quick and easy BIOS update using GIGABYTE’s @BIOS utility that is freely available from the GIGABYTE website.

Tech companies love a good Q&A because we tell ourselves that people are interested in our new tech and are asking these pertinent questions of it. So here is our GIGABYTE Hybrid EFI Technology Q&A:

Question 1: When will GIGABYTE introduce an EFI compatible BIOS for their motherboards?

Answer 1: GIGABYTE has already introduced Hybrid EFI Technology that is fully compliant with EFI aware operating systems. This BIOS is shipping now with all GIGABYTE P67 and H67 chipset motherboards, and we have started introducing this BIOS on motherboards using other chipsets with the intention of making is available on all GIGABYTE motherboards.

Question 2: Why did GIGABYTE choose to use a hybrid EFI instead of a standard EFI technology?

Answer 2: GIGABYTE Hybrid EFI Technology allows us to quickly offer EFI functionality to a whole range of motherboards, not just the latest 6 series products, because it is based on GIGABYTE’s tried and tested BIOS.

Question 3: Why does GIGABYTE’s Hybrid EFI Technology not support using a mouse or have a mouse-friendly graphical interface?

Answer 3: Mouse support and the accompanying graphical interface are not part of the EFI spec. That’s why some motherboard makers have chosen to have mouse support with their EFI BIOS while others don’t. One of the features of the EFI BIOS is that it is modular, so mouse support and a graphical interface are additional modules that some vendors have added to their EFI BIOS. This also explains how GIGABYTE has been able to add an EFI module to our stable and reliable BIOS. GIGABYTE’s Hybrid EFI technology keeps the same familiar interface that millions of users are used to. It is quick, easy to use and overclockers can enter the BIOS and change settings as quickly (or even quicker) than if they were using a mouse.

Question 4: What are the advantages of GIGABYTE’s Hybrid EFI Technology?

Answer 4:

1. It supports booting from 2.2TB+ HDDs. GIGABYTE mentions 3TB+ because the next size up from a 2TB HDD is actually 3TB, not 2.2TB. GIGABYTE Hybrid EFI Technology provides headroom for a maximum disk and partition size of 9.4ZB (9.4 x 10²¹ bytes; kB, MB, GB, TB, PB, EB, ZB, YB, etc...)

2. It uses a reliable, tried and tested GIGABYTE Award BIOS that has been updated and improved over many years. Our BIOS is compatible with thousands of ICs, components and 3^rd party products – a new BIOS needs a lot of compatibility testing before it is as mature as our Award BIOS. So basically we have the Best of Both Worlds with our Hybrid EFI Technology: stability of a mature BIOS and the 2.2TB+ support of an EFI BIOS.

3. Because of its design, it is easier to be backwards compatible with older motherboard models –X58 chipset down to new G41 chipset models will be able to enjoy Hybrid EFI Technology. So we are protecting our customers buying decision and helping to future proof their purchase. No other EFI solution can offer this!

4. GIGABYTE Hybrid EFI Technology is fully compliant with both EFI aware and non EFI aware operating systems.

 

Feel free to post additional questions in the comments section below and we’ll update this blog entry with the answers.

Some clear patterns are starting to emerge with the competitions being run at the moment on HWBOT. Mad222 from Hong Kong looks unbeatable with a monster 7.344GHz AMD CPUz and an equally impressive 1M time locking in tops spots in all categories and obliterating AMD world records in the mean time. His choice of board is GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD7 of course.

Sandy Blitz competition on HWBOT.ORG is proving to be even more interesting! It is now blaringly obviously that GIGABYTE P67 is the new king of 3DMARK01. All the top spots are taken up by P67A-UD7 and P67A-UD5 boards with Matose leading the way at 125,570 points wow.

What is perhaps more interesting is the current discussion among members comparing performance between different manufacturers and all seem to be finding out the same thing, if you want to compete in 01 you are wasting your time unless you’re on GIGABYTE P67 due to boards’ efficiency in the benchmark.

Not long to go now until GIGABYTE P67 February competition starts on HWBOT.ORG with one lucky overclocker taking home the new X58A-OC board. You have to win the competition to win this crazy board. I have a feeling this will get crazy hehehehe but play nice boys!

Cookie’s been busy and I hear he’s expecting a new bun out of the oven or did they say a board of some kind?!? She is matte black (hmm or white?!?) with orange stripes and some unusual looking features.

Wait, where’s the rest of the I/O panel? Some of you know this board as the new “orange OC board” but in fact her real name is X58A-OC. I can’t wait to show you more of this board that’s designed by overclockers for overclockers. Stay tuned!

 

GIGABYTE labs undertake some interesting projects from time to time. One such project was to see what white PCB based OC boards would look like and if it would be worth making them in terms of practicality and aesthetics. Bottom line was that white PCB is not as good as mattblack for extreme overclockers. Here is more from hicookie on this matter (I left it unedited, you can read between the lines hehehe):

You might interesting in if PCB going to be white. in history, yes there are couple of boards in white from AMD reference board now doing some project, company has chance to let us pick color of PCB we did some researching and testing, subzero and extreme high temp so, im going to tell you, the white isn't for extreme overclockers.

When you do extreme overclocking, you can't avoid let water or motherboard get wet even after you finish the benching, and just now you need to clean the board you will feel, its hard to check if there is " water " or not, get wet? or not.

White isn't the way for extreme ocer, also not easy to re-work or RMA repair. we use the best coating to make it keeps the oringinal color not turn to yellow or old under 85°C burning, but the matt-color is always better than white.

For our researching, the mat-black is the best chooise of color for extreme overclocker with GIGABYTE's P67 and upcoming X58 highend boards will all using matt-black, is a trend, right?

I had a look at Xtremesystems forum today and noticed a user from UK sporting his new GIGABYTE P67A-UD5 with a monster 5.7GHz overclock on air cooling.

Incredible chip this one. I think this is the first chip I've seen run on 57x multiplier as well.

He runs this setup at 5GHz stable with a Megahalem RevB air cooler.