"ENTRY"
I have long been a fan of IGP’s due to fact I generally have terrible luck with graphics cards & I usually buy budget boards so over the years I’ve always kept a close eye on the progression of IGP’s .
Five years ago I built my first rig around an amd 690g board which was the IGP leader at the time, I shocked many by over clocking the IGP after mounting a superior Northbridge cooler & achieving playable frame rates on many popular titles at the time, After that board gave up the ghost I replaced it with a
Gigabyte 780g board which as served me well ever since, I even managed to get cod 4 playable with a small overclock on low settings, when I posted these results on another forum many believed them to be fake or not possible from an IGP, but AMD have been making leaps and bounds in this field over the years & trinity is just the next incarnation.
Upon doing some research on the GA-F2A85X-UP4, I was stunned to find such a feature packed board at such a low price., This board uses the new FM2 A85x chipset this offers 3 main benefits over the older Llano A55 & A75, It offers eight SATA 6 Gbps ports native over six on A75 and A85X can support RAID 5.
The major difference is the A85X can support 2x8 lane Crossfire. All things my current board cant do! I’ve been very tempted to get a SSD of late but my lack of sata 3 makes me feel I wouldn’t get the full benefit of it, also crossfire in particular hybrid crossfire is always something I’ve want to have a play with but lack of support on my current board has always stopped me.
Gigabyte have used there Ultra Durable 5 technology which is made up off R3550 PowIRstage ICs from International Rectifier, 2X Copper PCB and high current Ferrite Chokes to deliver cooler temperatures, it also has more great overclocking features like Power, Reset,CLR CMOS button and a diagnostic LED. I quite honestly haven’t seen these features on any sub £150 board.
A board design for overclocking would be great & the fact that the IGP is on die rather than the Northbridge would make cooling so much easier unlike the 110c of my 690g on stock cooling.
It also has four display outputs on the board DVI, display port, HDMI and D-sub ports & the ability to run Eyefinity form a motherboard!!!!!! So I could set up getto eyefinity with a 15in 17in & 19in monitors!
Another feature of this board that really interests me is the “Switchable Graphics” which allows the dynamic switching between built-in graphics discrete graphics cards, which would obviously save substantial amounts of power as well as reducing heat & noise when not in use, also would have the added benefits of reduced nagging caused by the electric bill.
The last feature to really catch my eye was gigabytes’ 3D BIOS Mode it looks so sleek & smooth & will stop me being teleported to 1975 ever time I open the bios.
If I won this competition would help me breakout of my un- upgradable position am currently in; My current rig is
Cpu: AMD x3 720BE
Mobo: GA-MA78G-DS3H
Ram: 4gb corsair DDR2 800mghz
GFX: 4850
PSU: Thermaltake 430w
Mointor: 19inch Samsung
Am stuck in a catch 22, if I upgrade my monitor I’ll need a better graphics card which will need a better PSU then the gfx will be bottlenecked by the cpu, mobo,ram! So winning this & selling my old bits would give me a long overdue upgrade!
I would also use this new rig as a showcase to my friends, who until now have found pc gaming prohibitively expensive due to the need for graphics card & new psu, I am already suggesting trinity to a number of people who just buy low end pc’s but would like to game on them too.
A new build would also allow me to post reviews & project logs to stop me lurking so much these days !
I also believe IGPs are hugely important to the progression of pc gaming, If IGP’S of this quality become the norm, everyone would be able to pick up a pc game & play it! This would change the whole dynamic of the pc games market! It would get more people hooked!
Then OCUK can push them onto the hard stuff like 7970’s!
Also the more powerful the IGP out there the more powerful they will need to make lower end cards to justify them thus benefiting all entry level gamers.
I see many reviews being critical of trinity “yeah you can game, but an intel & separate card is better” but for twice the price. I think some people are completely missing the point AMD have quite frankly rewritten the rule book with trinity by releasing a product which quite
literally makes gaming mainstream.
(Good times) at playable settings and frame rates.
