Nothing new to test, no exams at university, no news about bulldozer…so today I would like to talk about Gigabyte.
In the last years I had lots of these overpriced piece of crap.
The only one that was worth to be bought was the P35-DS4, after than this I had only a bunch of piece of crap.
EP45-Extreme – had 3 of these – the first one arrived borked and never worked like it should do (especially considering it was 250 €), the second one after 4 months started to act weird, refuse to post with 4 DIMMs installed, then worked only with a set of Cellshock and finally died.
Had to RMA it, after the usual month, I had the replacement, put it in a case and after 4 months did exactly the same as the precedent one.
After sending it to Gigabyte I had to wait 2 months and half to get back the same board with a paper where they say that this piece of crap worked well.
I asked what kind of RAM they used but nothing, they didn’t reply my e-mail.
After had sent some more e-mails I was contacted by the local Gigabyte PR, he told me to go at a local shop and ask them to try my board and write somewhere that they certificate that the board doesn’t work…ya, sure, they will do this for me, especially for free…
I already wasted my money for the first RMA, I told them that I didn’t wanna waste no more but they kept bullshitting me.
They also told me that if I want they can pick up the board and send it to someone that could repair it, but this isn’t for free and I will have to pay the expense.
To sum it up: I sent them the board, after 2 month I had it back but it doesn’t worked properly, so I sent it to them for the second time and this time they said the fucking board was working correctly.
After this someone contacted me and told me probably they could repair the board but I had to pay for it…
That day I told myself that this would have been my last Gigabyte.
For the next 2 years I didn’t touched none of them, but when Sandy-Whore hitted the shelf I was forced to buy a Giga because they were the only one good for 3dmark 01.
I bought 2 Gigabyte, P67A-UD4 and later an UD5, and this was a BIG mistake.
The first UD4 arrived borked, VCORE different from AUTO and the mobo didn’t post…WTF, another DOA piece of crap.
RMA it and after 2 months I had a new one, this time at least I can change voltages…but…Elpida Hyper RAMs didn’t work well and can’t boot at high BCLK…and today, 26-09-2011 the situation is still the same because in Gigabyte they are lazy and doesn’t support their overpriced piece of crap.
Then I bought the UD5, same shit as UD4 but higher price…well played Giga…
I sold both these piece of crap and bought an EVGA, that is working ALOT better.
But there’s more, a bunch of months ago I recieved a Gigabyte g1.assassin, a 450 € uber high end mobo designed specifically for gamers – I have to argue even on that because a real gamer doesn’t looks at graphic details –
By the way, this beast arrived, I paired it with my i7-950 and one of my triple channel Elpida Hyper kit but after a bunch of minutes I found out that all my high end DDR3 kits refuse to work properly over 1700 MHz.
I also noticed that there was only a single LAN port managed by KillerNIC and that was a very bad choice because this thing is well known for its slow data transfer rate and its high CPU usage even if compared with the cheapo Realtek every other mainboard have.
I did my tests and wrote the review but when was the time to publish it the guys of Gigabyte HQ in Taiwan said that we wrote bullshits, that their KillerNIC wasn’t a piece of crap like everyone know and that they managed to run the memory at the astonishing frequency of 1900 MHz – that is well below the rated speed of my kits specifically built for Intel 1366 platform –
So, beware because I’ve the feeling they do this way with alot of reviewers, if you write what they like to read it’s ok, if you didn’t then you are not allowed to publish the review.
Moral of the story: keep yourself as far as possible from Gigabyte crap.