Somnolent

GIGABYTE HAD LOTS of new motherboards on show at Computex, but that wasn't the interesting part of the company's wares. The best thing was the unique technology it put into the beasts.


GA-EP45-DS5 board

The first board we were shown was at the higher end of the line, the GA-EP45-DS5, the second from the top of the line. It has almost all the goodies though, and is far from a run of the mill P45 mobo. The spec sheet shows two variations from the mainstream P45 boards, DDR2/1200 support and a 1600FSB. The DDR2/1200 was quite unusual, the 1600FSB is pretty common.

It doesn't stop there though, the listed 10 SATA ports have a unique twist to them, hardware RAID. There are two ports that allow for OS independent hardware RAID. You can set it in the BIOS and it looks like a single drive to any OS, completely transparent. Gigabyte also claims that it will back up the main non-RAID ports if you plug a HD in, but I am a little shaky on the details there.

The boards also have a TPM on them, something that attracted a great deal of attention a while ago, but now has come back down to reality. In addition to the normal TPM functions, you can also put in a USB drive and have it encrypted on the fly, or simply choose to apply crypto to a folder or file. Unfortunately, this only works on the Broken OS, so it is about as useful as a microwave oven option on a hang glider. I wonder if this is Gigabyte's fault or Intersil for not providing real drivers for their chips?

The other potentially really neat technology that is also hobbled by the Windows only black mark is DES or Dynamic Energy Savings. If you look around the CPU in the picture above, you will see six black boxes behind the red caps. Each one controls a power phase.

When load is light, DES shuts down phases two at a time to enhance efficiency. The two closest together turn off, then the middle ones to get to the minimum of two running the CPU. The next generation is said to get down to one phase when loads are light.

The problem is that it is software driven, and that software is Windows only. SIGH. Again, this is an Intersil chip, which is why I wonder about them. In any case, the phases can fire back up in less than 1/20 of a second, so it should be quicker than the mouse clicks needed to do anything important. Ramping down, they take 2-3 seconds per phase, so it is quick up, slow down.

One technology that is not Windows based is the problem indicator LEDs. There are blue LEDs that indicate problems in the CPU, memory, PCIe 16x, 1x and PCI as well as PATA and SATA. Basically if something is wrong, or there is a cable, card or chip inserted wrong, it will light up. I think it is easier to just look for the black smoke, but Gigabyte insists on doing it right.

There is also another interesting set of LEDs, the power state indicators. There are six LEDs, one for each power phase, 12 in the 12 phase DQ6, that flicker with power status. Think of it as a sound level meter for CPU power. They sit to the right of the bottom red DIMM slot.

On the power side, they have an Overvoltage IC. If you have ever overclocked, you probably know the CPU voltage settings leave a bit to be desired, they are quite coarse. The higher up you go, the worse they tend to get. This IC allows you to set CPU, memory, northbridge and PCIe voltage in 20mV increments. That should be enough granularity for the most insane overclockers.


GA-EP45-Extreme

That brings us to the next board, the GA-EP45-EXTREME. Why is it extreme? Notice the small apartment complex that doubles as a radiator between the northbridge and the PCIe slots? Well that is a radiator for the heatpipes attached to the watercooling block sitting on the northbridge. If you watercool your rig, you probably have a CPU water block, but northbridges tend to have board specific mounts. Problem solved with this board, plug and play, otherwise is it very similar to the DS5 minus a few of the nifty features above. There is also a EP45T version that takes DDR3.


GA-GC230D board

The last one up is the GA-GC230D, an Atom based board. It is small, the CPU is soldered down, and has the usual crippling restrictions that Intel imposes on this CPU. It is kind of sad because it could be a great board if fingers weren't broken when features were proposed. In any case, Gigabyte is in the Atom business, and has the same handcuffs on as anyone else.

At the end of the day, the chips that Gigabyte uses are roughly the same as everyone else's, but the extra engineering is what makes them stand out. They had far more of the useful extras than anyone else I saw at the show, so if you are looking for an enthusiast board, check out their lineup