Daily Reviews Summary 03/21/12

Of course, any board based on Intel's X79 chipset hardly rates as poverty item. At £175, the Gigabyte X79-UD3 ain't exactly cheap, but it is within a fiver of the cheapest X79 motherboards on the market. Everything, therefore, is relative. Consequently, the Gigabyte X79-UD3 is flagrantly frills-free. But with so many features now finding their way onto the the CPU die itself, including the memory controller and PCI Express bus, you could argue motherboards in general are less critical.So Gigabyte's task is to deliver quality and performance where it matters while not going overboard on the corner cutting compared with more expensive X79 models such as the Asus P9X79 Pro and MSI X79A-GD65 8D. If Gigabyte can pull that off, we can certainly live without trinkets such as hardware power switches and LED displays.BenchmarksThese days, we're accustomed to pretty consistent performance across motherboards sharing the same chipset.

Sitting at the top of OCZ's recently announced Champ1on Series of Fatal1ty PSUs is the 80Plus Gold Certified 1000w model with modular cables and very distinct styling. We have that very version on our test bench today and will find out if gamers should be putting it at the top of their shopping list for new system builds... after all we all need a new system with AMD and NVIDIA throwing out new GPUs almost weekly.

Low power usage, Radeon HD6550 and a price at 140$? What am I talking about? Well the AMD Llano A8-3870 cpu that we are going to review today, we are going to compare this what looks like a very competent cpu towards the Bulldozer.