Post Cards from the Edge - AMD 780G, NVIDIA 790i, Gigabyte 680i
by Gary Key on April 5, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
For a bright-eyed teenager in 1976 that had high hopes of becoming a journalist one day, the satirical film Network was a revelation suggesting maybe choosing another profession would be a wise move. (Ed: Look at where that got you.) After years of intense investigative coverage of Watergate and the resulting rise in credibility of the journalistic profession, it seemed the right - maybe even honorable - field of study during the college years... until that fateful New Year’s Day in 1976.
In 1976, the country was celebrating its bicentennial, trying to put Watergate and the Vietnam War out of our minds, and looking forward to an election that would chart a new direction in American politics. (These subjects sound familiar 32 years later.) Top films of that year really did represent what we were going through, and to some degree what we would become in the near future.
Rocky found us in love with the underdog who never gave up. All the President’s Men gave us a short synopsis of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of the journalistic team (Bernstein/Woodward) that broke the story and proved that journalists were sexy, provided you resembled a young Robert Redford. The Bad News Bears allowed us to take a humorous look at sports obsessed parents realizing that winning at any cost had taken the joy out of playing the game for many kids (kids who would become today’s Soccer Moms and Dads).
I enjoyed many other movies that year with my friends, which more or less fit in with our very sarcastic yet humorous personalities. Some were dark like Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, The Omen, Obsession, and Carrie, while others were on the lighter side such as Silent Movie, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Silver Streak, and Mother, Jugs & Speed. Of course, we also had the breakout science fiction films, Logan’s Run and Futureworld. (Told you we were sarcastic.) All told, it was a decent year for film, and some thirty years later we still have Rocky, Pink Panther, and King Kong remakes.
However, there was one film that year that left a lasting impression on us; that film was the aforementioned and critically acclaimed Network. What All the President’s Men did to glorify the journalistic profession; Network succeeded in displaying the dark and seedy side of media. In retrospect, it also provided a fairly accurate glimpse of where TV/Print media was headed along with society. Sensationalism - some would say yellow journalism - sells and is what a large cross-section of society enjoys, whether they openly admit it or not.
In Network, Peter Finch played the aging news anchor, Howard Beale, who at one point in the film makes an impassioned speech that resulted in an extremely popular catch phrase of the time. He persuaded his watching audience to step outside and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This phrase struck a chord with mainstream America during that year and with us now.
It has been a couple of rough weeks for the motherboard team. Our best laid plans have been thwarted for a variety of reasons, most of which have us shouting the above phrase, and we are sure some of you feel the same way. Since the news and review sections are fairly quiet over the weekend, we thought it would be a good time to discuss those items that put a burr under our saddle - to address issues that our readership is having with the technology and companies that we cover on a periodic basis. Believe it or not, we rarely get to rant (and for very good reasons as you will see), but sometimes it's necessary to say what one thinks. So here is Rant Session #1 for your weekend enjoyment.
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BikeDude - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Gary, I just sent you an e-mail detailing some of my woes with PowerDVD. I look forward to your coverage of this abysmal piece of software, and I hope you will do some digging into questions like 'why do they spawn all those processes?'. Does it really take 110MB worth of software just to play a DVD or blu-ray movie? (I guess they have to justify their $100 price tag somehow)Dobs - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Personally I find the AMD 9900/9850BE @ 125W killing mb's to be the biggest news in this story.... This is like a "Don't risk AMD" commercial for me!Also this is the first I've heard about the X-48 8Gb issue???
"c) Haven’t found an Intel X48 board yet that will handle 8GB of DDR3 properly..."
X-48 (P5E3 Prem.) and 8 Gb is exactly what I want for my next build (like now).. and this is the first thing I heard about this 8 Gb problem. Is it just a problem for particular boards or all X-48 ICH9R chipsets??? Can someone please point me in the right direction to research this problem more?? (links please)
Thanks in advance.
Oh and congrats to Anandtech for a seriously gutsy story - well done!
Dobs - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Personally I find the AMD 9900/9850BE @ 125W killing mb's to be the biggest news in this story.... This is like a "Don't risk AMD" commercial for me!Also this is the first I've heard about the X-48 8Gb issue???
"c) Haven’t found an Intel X48 board yet that will handle 8GB of DDR3 properly..."
X-48 (P5E3 Prem.) and 8 Gb is exactly what I want for my next build (like now).. and this is the first thing I heard about this 8 Gb problem. Is it just a problem for particular boards or all X-48 ICH9R chipsets??? Can someone please point me in the right direction to research this problem more?? (links please)
Thanks in advance.
Oh and congrats to Anandtech for a seriously gutsy story - well done!
lamikr - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
At least I got from the previous 780G articles a feeling that these boards are designed for the people wanting to build HTPC systems with decent processing power of handling the encoding of full HD movies. And for this purposes the 780G boards are simply the best ones that have so far been released.When one wants instead of using the CPU's with 125 W of power consumption, it changes the requirements very much.
(One starts talking from the CPUs which have 2-3 times bigger power consumption TPD compared to 4850e)
Therefore it is understandable that those systems will also need some other type of motherboard than mATX.
I however agree that the 780G board manufacturers should now start mentioning the maximum TPD that their boards support.
Mika
BikeDude - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Ditto.I have an old 4GB system now, and given the low price of memory, I'd certainly go for at least 8GB in my next configuration. Even my laptop has 4GB now. (I'd like more there as well, but it is hard to find laptops that offer more room for expansion, heck some are still maxed out at 2GB!)
Tuvoc - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Well on the Intel side, the ASUS P5N-E SLI is a budget board, with 3=phase power. Yet it has been running my 130w QX6700 for over one year now 24/7. So 3-phase power can cope with power hungry CPUscjb110 - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
I was just wondering how much of the problem with the Gigabyte board is their fault? It sounds like the handling of the problem wasn't ideal, but from a technical point? Did gigabyte make the board badly? bad bios coding?Surely nvidia have something to answer for? after all they made the chipset and provided the info (or not) as to how it works and what it can do?
Blazer7 - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
All 3 680 based ASUS boards do support the QX6850 and Wolfdale. In fact ASUS released a beta that offers support for Yorkfield too but that works only when running @ stock. Any attempt to oc results in stability issues. Yet they did good on their claims for their boards and they also proved beyond any doubt that the problem lies with the design and not with the chipset.On the other hand Gigabyte did advertise their board as one that featured “several next generation technologies including FSB1333 support for the record-setting Intel® Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processors”. Guess what, they didn't deliver. The board does not support a single 1333 Quad Core, Extreme or other. Not even Wolfdale is supported.
Kudos to AT for their stance on this one. It sure took a lot of guts to publish this article especially considering that Gigabyte must be spending quite a bit here @ AT for all these banners and ads.
johnsonx - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
On Thursday afternoon I left a new system build running at my office. It uses an X2-6400 on an ECS AMD770 board. Just like the 780 board you have, I see on ECS' website that they don't officially support the 6400 or any other 125W TDP processor. I didn't think to check, I just ASSumed that any new board that claims to be Phenom ready would support any current AMD CPU. I wonder what I'm going to find when I go back to the office? Stay tuned...johnsonx - Tuesday, April 8, 2008 - link
Well, if anyone at all was curious, the system survived a few hours of Prime95, so I delivered it to the customer. At this point I'm ASSuming that the board can handle the X2-6400 just fine.