No Tim this week, sadly, but that won’t stop this runaway podcasting freight train. Darren and Terrence will be joining Brian to discuss the biggest news of this post-holiday / pre-CES lull, but mostly we’ll be talking about the year that wasn’t — join us in the chat below or send a note to podcast (at) engadget (dot) com to share your thoughts on the biggest tech misfires of the year. Continue reading The Engadget Podcast is live tonight at 5PM! The Engadget Podcast is live tonight at 5PM! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:30:00 EDT
More:
The Engadget Podcast is live tonight at 5PM!
If you are a normal desktop user or even a power user with plans to run at over 4GHz, the vanilla LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge platform is good enough. You get some of the fastest CPUs on the market today paired with reasonably priced motherboards and the ability to use Quick Sync to transcode video…er..
Over the years, Gigabyte has given us some interesting products. More recently in the past 18 months, Rajinder gave their H55N-USB3 motherboard a well deserved recommendation, and more recently, I have scrutinized their Sandy Bridge range. For X79, Gigabyte is uncharacteristically launching only a few motherboards, of which we are looking at their cheapest model, the GA-X79-UD3. We are also for the first time introduced to what Gigabyte believe should be a graphical BIOS compared to their competitors. Read on for the full review. 
At the launch of Intel’s LGA-2011 based Sandy Bridge E CPU we finally had a platform capable of supporting PCI Express 3.0, but we lacked GPUs to test it with. That all changed this past week as we worked on our review of the Radeon HD 7970 , the world’s first 28nm GPU with support for PCIe 3.0. The move to PCIe 3.0 increases per-lane bandwidth from 500MB/s to 1GB/s. 
