Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 Motherboard has Hardware Heaven on cloud 9

Our high-end AMD 900 series motherboard offering has certainly impressed Stuart Davidson at HardwareHeaven.com. The 990FXA-UD7 was given a thorough and detailed examination last week, winning an impressive 49 out of 50 points plus the Hardware Heaven Gold award. Here’s a taste of what Stu had to say:

Performance wise the 990FXA-UD7 is again very impressive. It outperforms the fastest board we have seen so far from ASUS and features all of the latest technology such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s to utilise the potential of our components. Users may also find support for 3TB drives, enhanced USB charging and Bluetooth auto shutdown to be valuable features.

Of course these high specifications and features do come at a cost which makes this board more expensive than most 990FX alternatives. That said, at £189/$249 the 990FXA-UD7 is still considerably cheaper than alternative boards for the Intel X58 platform.

Summary
An excellent motherboard which has great performance and some excellent features. Added to that it is the fastest AMD 990FX board we have tested so far.

The 990FXA-UD7 is in fact the most highly specced AMD motherboard that GIGABYTE has ever done, in fact the first in our UD7 class. Let’s not forget too that excitement levels should notch up a level in a month or so’s time when AMD highly anticipated AMD FX Bulldozer CPUs come to market. We can barely contain our excitement.

Full HardwareHeaven review here.

Read this blog in Chinese here.

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Cloud Sourcing the Corporation: Strategies You Can Use 100 Vendors You Should Know (Paperback)

Cloud Sourcing the Corporation: Strategies You Can Use 100 Vendors You Should Know (Paperback)
By Ben Trowbridge

Buy new: $20.43
Customer Rating:

First tagged by Allison
Customer tags: outsourcing(2), cloud sourcing(2), cloud(2), alsbridge(2), technology(2), networking(2), applications, bpaas, business, business applications, bpo, beginners guide

Review & Description

The existing technology market is being destroyed to make way for the new, faster-moving cloud services world. But an immature market provides both opportunities and pitfalls for today’s CIO. Cloud Sourcing the Corporation provides a holistic perspective on the evolving cloud services market and acts as a guidebook for IT executives on their journey toward the cloud. Included in the book is the Cloud Sourcing 100 index (www.cloudsourcing100. com), the first exhaustive review of the emerging cloud services landscape with classifications and ratings. Read more

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Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing

Many feel that cloud computing is just old wine in new bottles, but Infrastructure as a Service, the foundation of cloud computing, is a very interesting evolution of the current hosting formulas. A good cloud hosting starts by building on a clustered hosting solution: instead of relying on one server, we get the high availability and the load balancing capabilities of a complete virtualized cluster. Virtualization allows the management software to carve up the cluster any way the customers like--choose the number of CPUs, RAM and storage that you want and make your own customized server; if you need more resources for a brief period, the cluster can provide this in a few seconds and you only pay for the time that you actually use this extra capacity. Best of all, cloud hosting allows you to set up a new server in less than an hour. Cloud hosting or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is definitely something new. Technically it is evolutionary, but from the customer point of view it offers a kind of flexibility that is revolutionary.

Terremark was one of the first hosting providers to offer such IaaS services. With clients including the USA.gov site and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they seem to have gotten IaaS right. But we don’t care much about the marketing fluff; we want to start benchmarking in true AnandTech style. We want to know what kind of performance we get when we purchase a certain amount of resources. If we buy 5GHz or 20GHz of CPU power, what do we get? Can IaaS really replace your own server infrastructure if you are running some heavy duty applications? Read on for our investigation and analysis.

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