Intel and Gigabyte

Intel

Besides officially launching the 3-series chipset at Computex, Intel also was showcasing their upcoming Penryn family of CPUs. During a press presentation on Wednesday Intel demonstrated their successor to today’s “V8” platform running with two quad-core Penryn CPUs at 3.0GHz. Each CPU ships with 12MB of cache onboard, so 24MB of L2 cache effectively for the entire platform.

Intel used the demo to showcase the power of Penryn’s new SSE4 instructions. We were shown benches of both DivX as well as Cinebench 10. You can see the Cinbench score in the image above: as you can see the Penryn-based V8 platform turned in a score of over 22,000 in Cinebench 10!

Gigabyte

Gigabyte had a wide range of AMD and Intel-based motherboards on display at their Computex booth. Arguably the most eye-opening board was Gigabyte’s RD790-based GA-M790-DQ6.

The GA-M790-DQ6 features a whopping four PCI Express graphics slots. In fact on the show floor Gigabyte had the GA-M790-DQ6 up and running with four Radeon HD 2600 XT cards, although they weren’t running in CrossFire mode. For multi-monitor users, this configuration would allow you to run eight distinct monitors from the system! The board is built with all-solid Japanese capacitors, supports Gigabyte’s SilentPipe heat pipe technology for cooling the chipset and VRM circuitry, and supports AMD RD790 features such as HyperTransport 3, PCIe 2.0, and DDR2-1066.


Another popular item in the Gigabyte booth is their upcoming X38 motherboard, the GA-X38T-DQ6. The GA-X38T-DQ6 lists support for DDR3-1600, and ships with Intel’s ICH9R South Bridge. If you’re not quite ready to take the plunge and splurge for DDR3 memory, Gigabyte also makes a DDR2 version, the GA-X38-DQ6.


Gigabyte also had a P35 motherboard with both DDR3 and DDR2 memory slots onboard, the GA-P35C-DS3R. As you can see in the photos, the GA-P35C-DS3R ships with two DDR3 slots and four DDR2 memory slots. From what we’ve been told, due to routing issues these combo DDR3+DDR2 motherboard don’t run quite as fast as P35 motherboards with dedicated slots solely for DDR3 or DDR2, but for those who aren’t as picky about performance and want an upgrade path available for DDR3 once DDR3 modules are more inexpensive, a combo board like the GA-P35C-DS3R would be a good choice. The GA-P35C-DS3R supports DDR3 speeds up to 1333MHz.


Gigabyte was also showing off their new cases. One case, the 3D Mercury, has a built-in liquid-cooling system. Optional accessories for the 3D Mercury include Gigabyte’s Blue Eye, which provides VGA liquid cooling, and Gigabyte’s new line of power supplies.


On the VGA side, Gigabyte showed off their new line of SilentPipe 3 cards based on NVIDIA’s GeForce 8500 and 8600 GPUs as well as the Radeon 2600 XT. The cards use heat pipe cooling in order to run silently.