Gigabyte Intel Core ATX Motherboard GA-X58A-UD7 Review

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(More customer reviews)
Here is a "flagship" motherboard from Gigabyte that promises the world and leaves you hanging. It all sounds amazingly good on paper but absolutely fails to deliver in practice. Anyone who did a quick research about this board can easily spot widespread memory issues. This board is very finicky about what memory is used. In my case it didn't even like the one I picked from vendor's approved module list (Patriot Viper Triple channel 2000mhz 6 gig kit). Although explicitly stating it supported DDR3 2100+ speeds, people including myself had problems getting past the stock 1066Mhz setting. Having said that it is a colossal shortcoming for an overclocker's board. Turning to Gigabyte tech support for resolving this issue was in no way shape or form helpful. Let's just say that Gigabyte Tech Support was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. Bios flash after bios flash and various settings, I came to the sad realization that, at least in my case, it was a no go for fast settings. Overclocking capabilities are good, but no cigar yet for this board. Good overclocking yields is expected from a board of this price segment. Things start to look even worse when compared to EVGA's X58 boards. The chipset cooling attachment is big and intimidating, and quite pretty to look at. At first glance, it arouses a certain level of curiosity and excitement. Once again, in typical fashion of this board, the big bad mean NB cooler falls short also. In fact, under stock settings at full load it is very hot. You can crack a few eggs on it.
So what is good with this board? Let's see... The layout is good, although if you incorporate the NB cooler, it becomes very cramped in that section. X58-UD7 incorporates 24 phase power, USB 3.0 and Sata 3 as well as added copper which Gigabyte claims will result in a cooler running board, less energy waste, and a more stable board which yields better overclocking return.
I feel that this is a half baked product rushed to the market to claim "we did it 1st!." Obviously they are the 1st manufacturer to roll out a product with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. However, USB 3.0 and SATA 3 are not a part of an official AMD or INTEL controller yet. Which means it is a 3rd party controller that is slapped on the PCIe bus. Bad news is, the more PCIe bus gets populated the less available bandwidth to each device. That is true for your killer fast graphics card also. There are few articles on hardware enthusiast websites, which show that SATA 3 is essentially does not make any difference when compared to sata 2. However, with the advent of insanely fast SSDs this is sure to change. SSDs with their mind blowing speed will be required to saturate that kind of bandwidth. Until then, it only seems wise to wait until INTEL and AMD decide to incorporate USB 3.0 and SATA 3 into one of their upcoming chipsets. Hopefully by then SSD prices will soften a little more.
Coming back to our review at hand here... This board is way too expensive to have all these issues and especially for a "flagship" hardware, I cannot help but have a bitter smile on my face. Because it is not worthy of that many dollars and that title. If you are hellbent on buying this board because it looks good on paper feel free to do so. And those who are looking for a great built with rock solid stability need to look elsewhere.
Feel free to comment, I would like to see what others thought about this review and the board.


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Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Intel Core i7/ LGA1366/ Intel X58/ 6DDR3-2200/ 3-Way ATI CrossFireX?/NVIDIA SLI/ 2GbE/ Raid/ 7.1-CH ATX Motherboard

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Toshiba 16" Satellite A665-S6095 Intel Core i5 Laptop 4GB Notebook 500GB Computer PC Review

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(More customer reviews)When it came to laptops I am extremely picky. I can pretty much guarantee that you will be satisfied with this laptop. I bought it on sale at a store and was so impressed I decided to write a review here on Amazon. I wasn't too keen on how the screen portion was hinged to the body of the laptop, but after looking at several other brands and models they all appeared to have the same style hinge so that negated that argument. I also have never been fond of preloaded software and immediately uninstalled a few things, but I also noticed that some of the software preloaded was pretty neat and left them on, which is rare for me to do since I believe they only bog down the operating system and computer. Another small annoyance of this laptop was its hard drive fail-safe program that, upon detection of vibration, moves the hard drive's arm off the disks to prevent damage. It seemed really sensitive and it causes a pop up informing you that it temporarily moved the arm aside. It quickly got annoying but I discovered that you can turn the pop up off but leave the fail-safe program running. Occasionally you'll notice it kick on and off when you move your laptop around for it stutters audio for a brief second. Alas, I won't knock the score because if you wanted, you can completely disable the program. I found the SATA/USB combo port very interesting and clever. It also can charge your mp3 players or anything else USB charged even if the laptop is off! The program associated with this feature lets you set it so when the laptop battery level gets to a certain point of charge it'll cut off the power to that port. I thought that was cool too. ALSO associated with that feature is the ability to use the Mic/Line In port (The fact that the microphone slot is also a line in was awesome) to let your mp3 player play music through the laptop's speakers whether its off, sleeping, etc until the battery hits that point you set in the program. The computer has facial recognition which is kinda neat; the background doesn't seem to influence the recognition too much. I haven't messed with it too much to say much since its just faster to type a password in. Although, I noticed that upon failed facial recognition it'll snap a picture of who tried to login and you can view that log when you log on yourself later - that was kinda cool. I didn't know about the backlit keyboard when I purchased it so you can imagine my surprise when it finished charging and I turned it on at 1am in the morning. It looks very cool. The laptop features an economic mode that pretty much shuts everything off to squeeze out as much battery life as possible and yet keep the operating system running. With the mode on and the wireless radio off it seems to get about four hours. With the wireless radio on its about two and half or so. With it running normally its about two hours. I don't intend to be away from an outlet more then two hours since I have an inverter in my vehicle and most classrooms or lobbies have an outlet for use nearby. Anyways, I apologize about the random order of this review, I was writing as things came to mind. I will update this if anything critically fails so it can just be a heads up!

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Samsung RF510-S01 15.6-Inch HD LED Laptop (Graphite Radiant Burst) Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this laptop a couple weeks ago and so far I'm extremely pleased with it. All the research I did before buying this thing definitely paid off, because this is one quality product. For some reason this laptop isn't sold in stores and therefore there aren't many reviews, which had me a little hesitant at first. But for the price, specs, and the few reviews I did find, I couldn't refuse. The graphite radiant burst is more of a shiny black with a purplish tint when under direct light, which actually looks a lot better than the press shots make it seem, in my opinion. The lid definitely picks up fingerprints, but it's stylish enough for me not to mind an occasional wipe-down. For casual gaming, this thing performs great. I was able to play Unreal Tournament 3 on all the highest settings with no problem. Based on another review, the 3dmark06 test (measures graphics performance) had a slightly higher score than the competition I had considered (dell xps 15, acer aspire 5740g, samsung r780), though not as high as the Gateway ID49C08u. It's PCMark vantage test did score higher than the Gateway though, so in the end I thought this was overall the better product, especially considering it's up-to-date features such as USB 3.0. I'm sure all of the above perform great, but I'm definitely not lacking anything in terms of performance with this machine. Depending on the exact features you're looking for though, the Dell, Acer and Gateway are definitely worth looking into. And if you're willing to spend a little more money, the HP ENVY 14 might be the way to go. For me personally though, this was the perfect choice and I am extremely happy with it.

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