Gigabyte’s is preparing its new Z87 motherboard lineup featuring the Ultra Durable 5 design for Haswell’s launch in June. While Gigabyte has already been teasing their upcoming Z87 motherboards on their facebook page, a forum member on Chiphell leaked their upcoming mainstream Z87X-UD3H motherboard.

Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H – The Mainstream Z87 Motherboard

While there are no actual photos of the board itself, the picture and specifications on the packaging is enough to give us a representation of the features the new motherboard would include. First of all, the Z87X-UD3H features the LGA 1150 socket to support Haswell processors. It comes with a Black, Blue and Gray color combination and has three sets of heatsinks, two sitting on top VRM phases and a single sitting on top the Z87 PCH.

The Ultra Durable 5 design makes the Z87 motherboards use an All IR Digital Power Design (IOR International Rectifier) with IR digital PWMs equipped with IR Powerstage ICs. The PCB itself is a 2 layer copper design and equipped with Durable black solid capacitors. Other features include Intel LAN with high ESD protection, UEFI and DualBIOS support, On/Off Charge 2 (For quick charging mobile devices), Gaming headphone amplifier for enahnced audio quality, 10 USB 3.0 ports and 8 SATA 3 Ports for storage. Overclock friendly features include a Debug display near the DIMM slots and Quick buttons to allow Power On/Off, Reset, CMOS Clear, Dual BIOS, Smart Voltage, etc options.

For expansion slots, the motherboard features three PCI-e 3.0 x16 slots, three PCI-e 3.0 x1 slots and a single PCI slot. It offers both SLI and CrossFireX functionalities. The price was not mentioned but it would be cheaper than the high-end Z87 motherboards that Gigabyte has to offer on Haswell’s launch.

Intel has officially announced the launch date of their upcoming 4th Generation Haswell desktop processors. The launch would take place in the first week of June during the Computex 2013 event starting from 3rd – 7th June in Taipei. Along with the launch date, VR-Zone has released the first image of the Haswell desktop box packaging which looks quiet interesting. The complete Haswell microarchitecture details can be found here.

Intel Haswell – 4th Generation Micro-processor from Chipzilla!

The Intel Haswell desktop processor lineup would consist of 14 new desktop Core i7 and Core i5 chips. The Intel R-Series Haswell chips would also be available for the desktop PCs but only in BGA packages. These would be limited to NUCs and All-In-One PCs. Compared to the regular desktop parts which come with GT2 (HD 4600) graphics chip the R-Series parts would feature faster GT3e (HD 5200) graphic chips with 128 MB DDR3 onboard eDRAM. Prices for the desktop lineup were leaked yesterday which can be seen below:

Image Courtesy of VR-Zone!

MSI has recently been teasing their upcoming Z87 motherboards through Facebook. They posted a teaser picture of their upcoming Z87 XPower board only a day ago showcasing its new Military Class 4 components. Today, MSI has released another teaser photo of their upcoming motherboard known as the Z87 MPower MAX.

MSI Z87 MPower MAX Teased – Comes With Military Class 4

While the Z87 XPower makes use of a total of 16 VRMs, the Z87 MPower MAX would feature 20 (8+12) VRMs further boosting the overclocking capabilities of the board. Along with these, MSI Z87 MPower would use Hi-C Caps, Super Ferrite Chokes and more features that would be revealed during the next month. Overclockers can add additional power to the processor with Dual 8-Pin connectors which is the same scheme as their XPower Z87 motherboard.

The electrical components are well hidden beneath the large U-shaped heatsink block. The Z77 MPower used heatpipe cooling system which ran through a set of heatsink, it could be possible that a similar cooling mechanism is featured on the new Z87 MPower MAX motherboard. The motherboard does retain its black and yellow design scheme. Another heatsink would be allocated to the PCH although its design is yet to be seen. The motherboard includes a three PCI-e 3.0 x16 and a few PCI-e x1 3.0 slots along with the addition of an M-Sata slot to support MSATA SSDs or WiFi modules. You can see the other teaser photo below:

Intel’s Core i7-4960X has also been benchmarked by Toppc at Coolaler Forums, the processor is the flagship part of the upcoming Ivy Bridge-E lineup which would replace the current HEDT “Sandy Bridge-E” platform. The CPU was benchmarked against the current flagship Core i7-3970X processor and clock frequencies were kept the same for a fair comparison.

Intel Core i7-4960X – Flagship Ivy Bridge-E CPU Benchmarked

Intel’s Core i7-4960X is based on the latest 22nm Tri-gate transistor technology, features 6 cores/12 threads and comes with a base clock of 3.30 GHz. The turbo boost frequency is kept at 3.50 GHz. The Core i7-4960X has 15MB of L3 Cache and has a lower TDP of 130W compared to 150W on the Core i7-3970X. As with Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, the Ivy Bridge-E lineup is also compatible with the Socket LGA 2011 on X79 chipset motherboards. The upcoming Haswell-E (2015) lineup would also remain compatible with Socket 2011 but would get a new chipset and DDR4 memory compatibility.

Today, AMD  would officially announce their latest Radeon HD 7990 Dual-Chip graphics card codenamed “Malta” which combines two Tahiti cores to offer blazing fast gaming performance. Announced almost a year ago, the Radeon 7990 was previously codenamed “New Zealand” and it did arrive however only in custom built boards by AIB partners of AMD.

AMD Radeon HD 7990 “Malta” – Retaking the Performance Crown

A year later, AMD has finally launched their Radeon HD 7990, featuring dual Tahiti XT (HD 7970) cores featuring a total of 8.6 Billion transistors, 4096 Stream processors, 2 Prim /Clock , 256 Texture mapping units and 64 Raster operating units. The Tahiti XT core is clocked at 1000 MHz or 1 GHz. The card features an impressive 6GB GDDR5 memory that operates along a 384-bit x 2 memory interface and is clocked at 6.0 GB/s effective frequency. The memory pump outs an impressive 576.0 GB/s bandwidth. The Radeon 7990 has a peak compute performance of 8.2 TFlops.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 is assembled using a dual-slot cooling solution which features triple fans etched on the shroud. These 92mm fans are part of the turbine cooling design which provides enhanced cooling performance to the internal vapor chamber heatsinks equipped on each core and fused together using copper heatpipes. Power is supplied through Dual 8-Pin connectors, a massive improvement over the Triple 8-Pin connectors over the custom boards from AIB partners which would pit the rated TDP around 375W. Even with such an improvement, the card barely delivers the same amount of efficiency as its competitor – the GeForce GTX 690. NVIDIA’s Kepler GK104 architecture has the upper hand in this case while the Radeon HD 7990 trumps it in pure computing performance

Last week, we reported that MSI may possibly be preparing a new overclocking motherboard known as Z87 Xpower. Based on the Z87 chipset, the new motherboard would be part of XPower Series, the MSI series of motherboards build specifically for overclockers and enthusiasts aiming to break the world records.

MSI Z87 XPower – The Big Daddy of Z87 OC Motherboards?

MSI released a teaser video for their upcoming Z87 XPower motherboard at the end of a large X sign was spotted on one of the motherboard’s heatsink indicating that a new flagship motherboard launch could be imminent. MSI has been, since then teasing new pictures on their official UK page and just recently did they dropped the bomb by showcasing that the upcoming motherboard would be using their Military Class 4 components which includes SFC’s (Super Ferrite Chokes), Black Solid state capacitors and a total of 16 VRM power phases that would deliver unprecedented amount of power and stability to the Haswell CPU core.

It has been reported by Brightsideofnews that NVIDIA would be launching their GeForce 700 series including the flagship GeForce GTX 780 as soon as May 2013. According to the information from their Asia based sources, the company is planning to launch three new GeForce 700 series SKUs which will be featuring refined version of the 28nm Kepler architecture.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 – Powered by GK110 Core Architecture

The most interesting part about the report is that we have already been hearing about the GeForce GTX Titan LE for the past few months. The card which is a consumer version of the already released Tesla K20C would not be another TItan GPU but rather the next flagship GeForce GTX 780 graphics card featuring the same specifications. The GeForce GTX 780 would be powered by the GK110 core boasting 2496 Cuda cores and a 5 GB GDDR5 VRAM which was indicated in a leaked picture of the board itself.

The leak could now be considered true since it was mentioned that Titan LE was just an internal codename of the card, retail name would be something else and with a different cooling scheme compared to the Titan. It was speculated that the Titan LE, now known as the GTX 780 would be priced around the $499 – $599 mark.

AMD launched their Never Settle bundle as a part of their “Gaming Evolved” initiative last year and since then has seen some major updates. The most major updates were the recently released “Never Settle” and “Never Settle: Reloaded” bundles which offered AMD GPU buyers with a wide range of game promotions depending on the model of the card they bought.

AMD didn’t only stop at bundling latest games with their Radeon HD 7000 series but like their rival NVIDIA, released a new range of graphical features such as the highly praised “Tress FX” effect which used OpenCL to render Lara Croft’s hair more realistic with accurate physics in her latest adventurer’s in Tomb Raider, the game was also bundled with AMD GPUs. The TressFX’s OpenCL rendering is sometimes called as AMD’s answer to PhysX from NVIDIA.

During the GDC 2013 announcement of Battlefield 4, it was revealed that AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 7990 was the graphic card running the 17 minutes of gameplay of the game and that too in 4K resolution downscaled to 1080P. Later on, it was reported that AMD might possibly be bundling the card with DICE’s Battlefield 4 game and a further AMD Never Settle bundle was being planned for launch that would be including Watch Dogs and a few other “yet to be announced” PC titles.

AMD Never Settle Gets Better than Ever With Battlefield 4, Watch Dogs and More

The folks over at TechReport forums seem to have found a confidential image of what seems to be a roadmap of AMD Never Settle bundle and would be including eight of the latest upcoming titles to spice up the value of AMD GPUs in 2013. These include some of the major blockbuster titles of 2013 such as Battlefield 4, Grid 2, Watch Dogs and Company of Heroes 2 which without a doubt are the most hyped around games of this year. The titles are listed below:

Prices for Intel’s upcoming Haswell Desktop lineup have been leaked by the Chinese publication site of VR-Zone. The Haswell desktop processors which arrive in June would be priced similar to the Ivy Bridge processors which were released in April 2012.

Intel Haswell Desktop CPU Prices Leaked

According to the leaked prices, the flagship Core i7-4770K Haswell Desktop processor is going to cost $327 while the faster Core i5 chip, the Core i5-4670K would be available for $230 US. Compared to the AMD FX CPU lineup, the Core i5-4670K would be $35 more expensive than the FX-8350 but would feature a new Haswell architecture and would ship with HD 4600 (GT2) graphics. Although there are a total of 14 Haswell processors that would ship on launch day, prices for only 8 specific models have been mentioned which can be seen below:

Model

Core/Threads

Base/Turbo(GHz)

L3 Cache

Graphics-Chip

Memory

TDP

Price

According to an analysis done by 3DCenter, NVIDIA could possibly be readying a new GeForce class graphics card codenamed “Titan Ultra” which would feature a fully enabled GK110 core. The GK110 is available on both the Tesla and GeForce front but neither of the lineups have till now featured a fully enabled GK110 core.

Currently, NVIDIA is preparing a cut down version of the already released GTX Titan codenamed “GeForce GTX Titan LE”. Later it was unveiled through a leak that the “LE” branding was for internal usage hence the official name of the card might be something else. The card is said to feature 2304-2496 Cuda cores and a 5 GB GDDR5 (384-bit) memory. It is speculated to be priced around $659-$759.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX TItan Ultra With 2880 Cores Possibly In Works?

Moving forward, NVIDIA would launch a fully enabled GK110 graphics card probably around 2013 or 2014 as speculated by 3DCenter. The new card is being referred to as GeForce GTX Titan Ultra, a name similar to its ancestor “GeForce 8800 Utlra” which featured tons of graphical performance but also came at a very high price.

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Ultra (if it ever launched) would feature 2880 Cuda cores and since the GK110 would have matured by then, we would be looking at even faster clock speeds of 950 MHz for core and 3400 MHz (6.8 GBps) for memory. You might remember GF-100 in its first iteration on the GTX 480 had much faster clock speeds compared to the GF-114 revision on the GTX 580 that pumped up the core count along with the clock speeds. We are looking at a similar scenario here. The card would feature the same amount of memory – 6 GB GDDR5 (384-bit)  and would have a rated TDP of 220-230W.