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Back when I was in high school, I got this particular memorable encouragement note in a fellowship group activity from this girl in church. “Being outspoken all the time does not necessarily make you cool”, it read. “Sometimes there is a need to shut up.” Well, for one thing, this ‘encouragement’ note did not sound very… encouraging. And secondly, in …

Over the coming months as we build up towards finally getting our hands on the Bulldozer platform, we’ll no doubt be looking at plenty of 990FX based motherboards from companies. Having already looked at what ASUS offered us in their ROG Crosshair V Formula board, today we’ll take the time to check out the GIGABYTE option. While GIGABYTE do have …

If it seems like Gigabyte is on top of the world these days, there just may be a reason why. Given exception to their industry leading motherboard selection which seems to be taking awards from all directions, their main Headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan is simply breathtaking. This Gigabyte HQ invite was definitely one of our highlights of Computex 2011. Gigabyte …

The one thing that Computex is not short of is attractive women to draw buyers in to look at the …  products? These beautiful women could be found in just about every booth and all reveled at the opportunity to have their picture taken with company products or Computex visitors. This is our choice as to the best of Computex …

One can improve the performance of small files by up to 50X which for certain types of setups can reap HUGE results. Webservers, File Servers, and OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) will benefit tremendously. There is definitely a large group of users that would be very interested in combining the positive aspects of both solutions (HDD/SSD) into one cohesive unit.  How …

After a period of time the SSD cache is going to be accessed quite frequently, and this has other advantages. Right now Cachecade is a read-only layer, so it might not be easy to understand the tremendous benefits that it has in regards to write performance on the HDD array. By freeing up the HDD from the most constantly addressed …

CacheCade performance is much more dependent on SSD read performance than on SSD write performance, so the performance depends upon the size of the SSDs and the total size of the data hot spots. If there simply aren’t many hot spots on the array being accelerated, you will not gain as large of a performance gain. Once again, in our …

This is the Test Bench and a quick click will display it close up.  As you may have guessed, it truly is no ordinary Test Bench, and I have dedicated many many hours creating this build, which has been used in many benchmarking excursions and extreme overclocking sessions. She has even set a few HWBot world records along the way! …

This is the single source test. The straight read testing just uses a single test file of 50GB that is read from the array as a 4k (aligned) Random Read pattern, at a Queue Depth of 32.  With this test it is showing the absolute best case scenario, results are usually going to be 2x of the more demanding zoned …

Zoned Setup- A more complex read pattern that is much more demanding of the caching algorithm. The overlapped cold-cool-warm-hot data regions IOMeter benchmark is the most stressful on the hot data caching algorithms and so results typically reach performance in the 30,000 to 45,000 IOPS range. The base array in this scenario is generating around 500 IOPS before acceleration, which …

ADDED VALUE During testing,  one thing that struck me was the sound of the drives, once they were loaded with information and being tested. The 4k random read is one of the hardest types of file access for any storage solution, especially Hard Disk Drives. At the beginning of each test, sitting in the room I could hear the sound …

Final Words and Conclusion With the introduction of Sandy Bridge at the beginning of 2011, consumers who could not wait for Z68 had to make two choices in terms of their motherboard chipset: H67 for GPU functionality, or P67 for overclockability. Ironically, due to the mishaps of the Cougar Point chipset, the mass recall of H67 and P67 motherboards gave most …

BIOS and Overclocking Of the two things that worried me about the Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3, the main one was the BIOS. As manufacturers such as MSI, ASUS, and ASROCK have started promoting their UEFI-only BIOS, I wondered if Gigabyte had done the same, and if they had done it right. As we can see, Gigabyte has done a terrific job with their UEFI …

Temperature, Power, and Efficiency The Z68X-UD3H-B3 yielded some excellent results when it came to overall efficiency: The Dynamic Energy Saver 2 feature also contributed its fair share to keep the entire system as adept as possible: NEXT: BIOS and Overclocking Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Specifications, Overview, and Features Page 3: Closer Look, Specifications, and Benchmark Testing Platform Page 4: CPU Benchmarks Page 5: Computation and …

Z68 Chipset-Specific Benchmarks LucidLogix Virtu In a nutshell, Virtu is software developed by LucidLogix that allows the use of a dedicated GPU and the CPU’s integrated GPU (as present on Sandy Bridge processors) simultaneously. There are three modes of operation: ‘Off’ (use of dedicated GPU only; integrated GPU is not being used), ‘i-Mode’ (integrated), and ‘d-mode’ (dedicated). ‘i-Mode’ is limited to …