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  • coolhardware - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Interesting motherboard. The OC emphasis and the included brace look to make it a pretty cool board for those wanting to up their OC efforts. Glad to hear it was reliable too, that is my primary consideration when purchasing a motherboard. :-)
  • JonesGaron - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - link

    Motherboard seems to be very attractive and interesting looking forward to see the functions of it. http://www.koolchart.com
  • geniekid - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Regarding the audio codec, I feel that anyone who could tell the difference between ALC892 and ALC898 or higher wouldn't be using onboard sound anyway.
  • ShieTar - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link

    You obviously ignore the fact that there are college students with good hearing but restricted budgets. Of course those won't usually complain about the money save on the cheaper on-board sound either.
  • AlderaaN - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Hello Ian and thank you for the review.

    Could you please tell us which BIOS version were you using for this review?
    I'm currently running under the official one (F6) that's posted on GIGABYTE's Website.

    Thanks again!
  • IanCutress - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    BIOS F6, as per the images on the BIOS section of the review: http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/3144#19
    I only ever use retail BIOSes downloadable from the website, and never 'BIOSes for review'. I want my results to be the ones you guys see.
    The only way I ever take beta BIOSes is usually if there's something that is fundamentally broken, or it's prelaunch and the relevant download pages are not available. Then I always ask for something as near to the public launch BIOS as possible.
    These reviews are always snapshots in time, as BIOSes in the future could have various performance tweaks or a shift in policy with regard idle states/MultiCore Turbo.

    Ian
  • AlderaaN - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Many thanks for the prompt and informative reply!

    Indeed I've seen the image but wasn't sure if that's what has been used for the actual review.

    Alright, time for some more OC tweaks here :)

    Regards,
  • Jasker - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Heads up. The links for competing motherboards on the last page are mail links.
  • IanCutress - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Thanks :) Fixed!
  • Flunk - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    This board is really compelling, I think the mix of OC features and mainstream price really speaks to enthusiasts (like us). It is a little sad that there is little reason to upgrade to an overclocked Haswell desktop from an overclocked Sandy or Ivy Bridge desktop because the Haswell chips just don't overclock as well so you end up with very similar performance after overclocking.

    I'm personally not seeing any reason to upgrade from my current i5-2500 @ 4.7Ghz. Hopefully Intel will release something more exciting sometime soon. Maybe whatever is after Broadwell, which doesn't look very interesting either.
  • IanCutress - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    With the last few generations, it's always been about 'have you got a good chip?'. A good OC chip of Ivy (or Sandy) has always been better than a bad chip this gen, and sometimes there isn't the certainty of getting a good chip this time around. That means the only jumps where it makes sense is when a bad chip in the newest gen beats your good chip. Each gen seems to give a 200-500 MHz IPC advantage (at 4GHz) depending on the CPU benchmark test (less in gaming), and you need to decide when that jump takes place if you're on the cutting edge of performance.

    But if you had a bad chip/ran at stock, then perhaps every two generations it makes sense to upgrade due to the IPC benefits. There are some pretty awesome low power chips this generation for example.
  • iTzSnypah - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    I guarantee you that setting your Uncore to x34/35 will make the chip require less Vcore to be stable at any frequency.
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Another use for the on board USB2 ports would be a thumbdrive to store bitlocker full disk encryption keys since the board doesn't appear to include a TPM keystore. Using an external USB port for that strikes me as mildly dangerous since it would be easy for someone to accidentally borrow the drive for something else.
  • Nirvanaosc - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Hi everyone,

    I've read a lot of reviews already and most of the time I feel that the given motherboard is not enough or too much for what I need.

    What would be the best for a day-to-day PC with a 4670K OCed and single GPU? This motherboard looks impressive but I think it's overkill for that purpose.
  • just4U - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link

    It's different for everyone.. For me right now it's the G1 Sniper M5. While Anandtech has mentioned it I don't believe they've reviewed one yet.. I like the onboard sound/lan options which are not the generic Realtek stuff and tend to go matx.. but still want a board that's a cut above.. Asus also makes something similar in their Maximus6 Gene.
  • vailr - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link

    Did your board include the updated version Intel C2 chipset? And: did Gigabyte change the board version to 1.1, in order to indicate the presence of the updated C2 chipset? The review's photo shows board version 1.0.
  • HardwareDufus - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link

    I really appreciate the inclusión of 2 HDMI ports instead of a DVI. I would love to find a Premium mini-ITX board that offered 2 HDMI ports.
  • samsp99 - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link

    Does the audio codec really make that much of a difference these days? An old receiver for d2a, or a headphone amp like a fiio e10 solve that deficiency pretty well.
  • CatheyBarrett48 - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link

    First time i trusted an online job add and managed to make 90$ in 5 hours... ℰ­x­i­t­3­5­.­c­o­m
  • genzai - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link

    I'm not sure what you mean by "for some reason only two of the chipset USB 3.0 ports are used. There are two USB 3.0 hubs for another eight USB 3.0 ports, and it seems..."

    If they used all 6 PCH SATA ports and put the FlexIO into PCIe, then they have 4 USB 3.0 ports to work with. 2 of those are routed directly to a FP header and then the other 2 each go to 4 port hubs to give another FP header and 6 rear ports. Seems perfectly logical and maximizes the available configuration.
    g\
  • DonnaCabel16 - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link

    First time i trusted an online job add and managed to make 90$ in 5 hours... ℰ­x­i­t­3­5­.­c­o­m
  • searocker - Thursday, October 17, 2013 - link

    Hi Guys, this mainboard has Stepping C2? thxx
  • ElphiGoji - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link

    I think this one of the best mother board...

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