Like many other manufacturers, MSI is building brands to aid the development of their product lines.  Over the past few Intel chipsets MSI have developed their Big Bang family, such as the P55 Trinergy, P55 Fuzion, X58 XPower, P67 Marshal, X79 XPower-II and now the latest, whilst devoid of the Big Bang part from the official title, is the Z77 MPower.  MSI have coined this as ‘XPower-II’s little brother’, designed as an overclocking board to be paired with the MSI Lightning range of GPUs.  As a result, the Z77 MPower is designed with the MSI Lightning Twin Frozr IV scheme in mind.  We’ve tackled one Z77 overclocking board already, so how does the MSI fare?  Read on for the full review.

Enthusiasts and speed freaks are always looking for an edge – a little something that will help push their gear that little bit faster.  There is already a market for pre-overclocked GPUs, and now SSDs are coming with internal RAID to push the boat over the SATA connections.  These require little-to-no knowledge of overclocking and are essentially plug and play.  When it comes to pushing GPUs higher, and motherboards, we get a dichotomous nature of ‘easy to OC’ against ‘advanced options to push the limits’.  In order to meet these two markets, the top four motherboard manufacturers have all come out with their respective weapons for Z77 and Ivy Bridge, aiming for either ~$220 or ~$380, and all of them have broken overclocking records at one stage or another since their release.  First up on our battle bridge is the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, designed by ASRock’s in-house overclocker Nick Shih, and commands a paltry $240 for all the goodies.

All the major motherboard manufacturers run different nomenclature when grouping their channel and high end products.  ROG, Fatal1ty and Big Bang are to name a few, and each have an associated meaning with the name.  Thus when products come along with a suffix such as ‘Golden’, we expect the best of the best, something that is number one.  Gold is for winners, and we will not accept anything less, otherwise it would be Silver, Bronze, or a wooden spoon.  The ECS Golden range covers graphics cards and motherboards, the latest of which is the motherboard we are testing today in the FM2/A85X Trinity line up – the ECS A85F2-A Golden.

Browsing through a manufacturer’s website can offer a startling view of the product line up.  Such was the case when I sprawled through Gigabyte’s range, only to find that they offer server line products, including dual processor motherboards.  These are typically sold in a B2B environment (to system builders and integrators) rather than to the public, but after a couple of emails they were happy to send over their GA-7PESH1 model and a couple of Xeon CPUs for testing.  Coming from a background where we used dual processor systems for some PhD CPU workstation throughput, it was interesting to see how the Sandy Bridge-E Xeons compared to consumer grade hardware for getting the job done.  Read on for the full review.

The mini-ITX motherboard market seems like a fast growing segment.  It has many applications in terms of small home servers, work machines, HTPC devices, mobile gaming desktop machines, and much more.  With most home users / non-enthusiasts using only one PCIe device and perhaps 1-2 SATA ports, a mini-ITX board makes perfect sense for a smaller system and perhaps a lower power footprint.  In this review, we take five of the Z77 mITX boards on the market today for a grand sweep using the HD 4000 enabled i3-3225.  Enter into the test bed the MSI Z77IA-E53, the Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi, the ASRock Z77E-ITX, the EVGA Z77 Stinger and the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe.  Game on!

Since Computex back in June, Gigabyte has been pushing a new power delivery system across parts of its motherboard range.  This involves an integrated circuit to combine power delivery MOSFETs into a small form factor with great heat dissipation, high efficiency and a smaller PCB space – the PowIRStage IC3550 they have been using is rated up to 60A of current each.  This makes sense in the high end spectrum (Z77X-UP7) where power might be needed, or in low airflow situations (mITX) to ensure longevity.  But is it required on a desktop Trinity board?  These things are expensive, which made me wonder if it is a worthwhile investment in a desktop Trinity system.  Read on for the full run-down of the F2A85X-UP4.

The A85X chipset and FM2 socket is supposedly here to stay for Trinity plus one more generation. As a result, AMD needs to make sure that the platform is right so that the new processors can slot straight in (whenever that may be). While they may have missed the ship on PCIe 3.0 (despite AMD pioneering it on the GPU side), we do get a tasty array of eight SATA 6 Gbps ports from the chipset with RAID 5 support and a promise that the integrated graphics part of the APU is powerful. In the next installment of our series of FM2/Trinity motherboard reviews, MSI sent us their top line motherboard to test. The FM2-A85XA-G65, while a rather lengthy classification, is a full sized ATX motherboard using the FM2 chipset in an MSI Military Class black and blue theme. At a mid-pack price of $100, MSI gives us the full eight FM2 SATA 6 Gbps ports, 5 fan headers, a full array of video outputs, and special features such as voltage read points and an OC Genie button. Read on for the full review.

The answer to the question ‘What makes a good motherboard?’ can generate an alarming number of responses.  When a manufacturer starts with a new chipset, the idealized view is that they partition the market off into segments – system integrators, HTPC, gaming, enthusiast, overclocker, legacy et al, and then try and get a fixed number of SKUs to target each one but encompass several others.  This is not always true – design can be driven by sales of particular regions where certain features go down well, for example in the Chinese Internet Café market only one HD video output is needed.  Today we look at the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6, the high-end ASRock solution to Trinity.

Reviews of the Ivy Bridge platform at AnandTech have focused solely on the primary chipset supplied to most desktop users – Z77.  In a twist, today we are reviewing both the H77 platform, but also a mITX product in the form of the Gigabyte H77N-WiFi.  Gigabyte has released two mITX motherboards for use with Ivy Bridge processors – both the H77 and Z77 variants, and they see the H77 as the one to focus on.  This makes sense as mITX builds are not often overclocked, and are limited to a single PCIe slot, making two of the main benefits of Z77 void and pointing to H77 as the answer.  Read on for the full review.

The new release of Trinity processors on the desktop opens up a cascade of issues when it comes to choosing a new motherboard for your Trinity system.  The main point of confusion comes in the face of chipsets, whereby multiple sockets and processor families can use the same chipsets and each motherboard manufacturer has a different naming scheme in order to differentiate the two.  Both Intel and AMD have been guilty of this in the past, but in the past 18 months we had no real cause for concern - until now.  With that, I give the first FM2 motherboard we are testing here at AnandTech, the ASUS F2A85-V Pro.  This full sized ATX board is aiming for the enthusiast in the Trinity space.

Now that the exclusive license Apple had for Thunderbolt has expired, since Computex 2012 we have seen a number of motherboards destined for PCs with a Thunderbolt connector.  Thunderbolt on a motherboard is still an added luxury, adding some $40 to the cost of the board to the user, though that can pale in comparison to the cost of Thunderbolt devices and storage.  Despite all this, Gigabyte’s foray into the Thunderbolt world is initiated in part by the board we are reviewing today – the Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH.  Using the Z77 chipset we get a motherboard with two Thunderbolt ports, but it also has the enhanced power delivery brought about by Ultra Durable 5.  Read on for the review and analysis.

As part of the Computex 2012 show, Gigabyte demonstrated to us their new version of Ultra Durable.  This fifth iteration of their power delivery combines their previous features with a new phase from International Rectifier, which is marketed to offer up to a 60°C lower temperature than traditional MOSFET solutions.  Initially this new design is being paired with six motherboards, all designated with UP rather than UD in the name.  The first of these we have in is the X79X-UP5 WiFi, which combines Ultra Durable 5 with the C606 chipset.  The C606 chipset is the server version of the X79 chipset, which enables increased IO and up to eight SAS ports.  Read on for the analysis and review.

The end of summer marks the start of the X79 refresh line.  We are, at best estimates, coming up to half-way in the Sandy Bridge-E life as the top of the line processor range before Ivy Bridge-E comes to market.  Both chips will be expected to run on X79 and the next chipset.  But in the meantime, manufacturers are coming up with ways to reinvigorate their X79 line up.  So insert ASRock, and the ASRock X79 Extreme11.  This motherboard comes with two PLX PEX 8747 chips, making up to 72 PCIe lanes available.  This are split into 64 for the PCIe slots (x16/x16/x16/x16 capable), and eight are directed to an LSI SAS 2308 PCIe 3.0 chip, which allows RAID 0, 1 and 10 on eight SATA ports, for a peak throughput of up to 4.0 GBps from eight drives in RAID-0.  Read on for the full review.