Hot off the back of our Steelseries competition, we've teamed up with the guys over at Cooler Master to give you the chance to win some more hardware. Up for grabs today we have the Silencio 550 case, the GX 550w PSU and the Storm Sentinal gaming mouse.
Today we are reviewing a new card from Gigabyte, the HD6770 Silent Cell, which is a passively cooled discrete graphics card built on a 2oz copper layer with full overclocking capabilities. Gigabyte also claim that temperatures with this design be reduced by 10% when compared against the reference solution. Is this an ideal graphics card for a low noise performance PC?
The Z68XP-UD5 is obviously based on Intel's Z68 chipset and is designed to take your Sandy Bridge processor to the next level. Designed with Intel's own iGPU, the user can overclock it as well as the CPU. Gigabyte upgraded the Z68XP-UD5 to include an HDMI connection, something the original Z68X-UD5 did not have. These few features along with Gigabyte's transition to an all-black PCB, along with the SLI and CrossFire support the new and improved Z68XP-UD5 looks to be a winner.
ByteSized
The Pure Platinum Z68 is the Sapphire's first entry for the Z68 chipset of Intel, which is capable of technologies such as Smart Response and Virtu. The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 includes 4 DIMM slots with support of up to 16GB of RAM with speeds of up to 1600+MHz. For network connectivity, the Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 has a Marvell chip controlled Gigabit LAN port and wireless capability via a Bluetooth 2.1 receiver. Storage options are many in the Pure Platinum Z68, with 8 total SATA ports; 4 SATA II with RAID 0,1,5,10 and AHCI controlled by the Z68 chipset, while there are 2 SATA III ports also controlled by the Z68 and the last 2 are controlled by Marvell's controller. Peripherals on the Z68 Pure Platinum are 2 USB 3.0 with up to 12 total USB 2.0 ports (including the USB headers), with 4 on the rear panel.
