Quote:
Originally Posted by Sin0822Â 
A word to the wise watching these forums, asus, asrock, msi, evga all hate GB for their Z77 pricing, thus companies with the resources(there really are only 2 who can afford full time forum trolls) I already caught 1 troll who worked for one of those companies posting in my threads on more than 1 forum, i am not saying that every new member who comes here with 2 posts and 0 rep is a troll, they aren't. They are here so that we can help them as this is the most active thread for these boards on the internet.
A word to the wise watching these forums, asus, asrock, msi, evga all hate GB for their Z77 pricing, thus companies with the resources(there really are only 2 who can afford full time forum trolls) I already caught 1 troll who worked for one of those companies posting in my threads on more than 1 forum, i am not saying that every new member who comes here with 2 posts and 0 rep is a troll, they aren't. They are here so that we can help them as this is the most active thread for these boards on the internet.
Ok, since I happen to have only a handful of posts on my back, zero rep and I got that "but you probably already knew that" from barkeater, I feel compelled to address this comment. Sorry, I won't be brief, since being brief before has led, I believe, to a misunderstanding.
Once it was witches, then there were commies, now it's trolls. Every age has its obsessions. :-)
I have no way to convince you, but let me state this in a clearer way: I have been positively impressed by Gigabyte's outstanding board quality. I am writing this from a Ga-8iexp-something (I don't even remember since it's been so long...) that I bought 10 years ago. Yes I am still using a Pentium 4 8-O and not even a fast one. Apart from some minor problems that were fixed in the next revision (mine is rev 1.0), the board has never let me down. My cat even peed on it, I had to take it out of the case, wash it with alcohol, scrape away some (electrolyte?) that seeped from the capacitors near the CPU (solid state capacitors were prolly off limits back then, I guess) and it's still rock solid.
That is the reason I want to buy Gigabyte again (and I have bought Gigabyte for my nieces and cousin's computers).
That is the reason I am here.
I looked up Asrock, Asus and MSI, because I am not a fanboy. I believe Asrock should fire (or at least crucify for half an afternoon) the PR guy who let a picture of a bent board be used for its publicity. I mean, what is the message you give about board quality when you show a board that bends like cardboard? If that's the level of attention to details of your company, then I am not going to be your customer.
MSI didn't feel just right for my needs, tough luck.
Asus almost got me with their "super power saving that will make polar bears shove the snow from your front yard and pandas write you love letters with haikus". But then their power consumption - according to all the comparative reviews I've seen so far - are way higher than Gigabyte's (who knows, maybe because of the ceramic capacitors... :-) ). Moreover, they did away with DVI on the boards that I was interested in, so...
...so here I am. Still thinking "D***n, another rev 1.0 board, what could be wrong this time? something I don't give a **** about, like the distorted audio on the 8iexp (and something else I do not even remember), or something I do care about, like stability at low power consumption?"
And then I read opinions about a bios that seems a bit too buggy (early versions of the uefi not working with logitech and microsoft mice? random freezings, the 100.1 bclk fix, people who has to step up their voltages more than they wished to in order to achieve stability...), probably because of an early release, or because Intel supposedly had the manufacturers wait until they perfected (so to speak, thinking what they did with the TIM) their Ivy Bridge act. Then I stumbled upon the page mentioning the missing capacitors and I think: mmmm, what would happen if the caps were indeed required and gigabyte's engineers were overconfident in their "our copper is thicker than the others"? Is it possible for the cpu to receive the wrong voltage and then shut down (-> random freezes)?
I know it sounds like "the earthquake happened only after Urugh ate the sacred berries, so let's throw Urugh into the volcano to appease the angry gods". But I believe it's quite normal trying to see the source of (all?) problems in what has been done differently from the past - or from other manufacturers (including Intel itself, if I am not mistaken).
I read fasty's and yours replies to that issue (I apologize I did that after barkeater pointed out it had already been discussed but I have little or no trust in forum search engines so I tend not to use them much - I am a Usenet kind of guy). Basically the reason for the lack of caps is that their VRM is the best out there and they can do away with the caps under the cpu. You pointed out that Asrock has no digital PWM suppliers, but that made me wonder: is ASUS's all digital power supply so inferior to gigabyte's (I could not find the chip used by their P8Z77 boards) that they HAVE TO USE CAPS (pun intended)?
It also strikes me as odd the lack of curiosity for a solution that differentiate these boards from the competition. Just saying "GB's VRM is the best bar none, so if you bring the matter up you must be a troll, or a mudslinger paid by the competition - hence we should not discuss it anymore" is a bit too fanboyish for my tastes.
Nobody is interested in the details - and possible drawbacks - of such a feat? Or is that the ultimate perfection in voltage reg design?
I believe Gigabyte engineers are human, hence fallible: after all, there is a rev 1.2 of the GA 8iexp, so, at least in the past, they felt like they did something that could be done better . From what I've read thus far the capacitors can be done away with if you have a speedy voltage regulator and low ohmic losses. Murphy rules at hand, there are lots of things that could go wrong: overestimating the thickness of the copper stripes ("what do you mean UD4? Isn't this a UD5 board?" :-) ), an engineering error ("Oh, the capacitors are not those cute curly symbols?"), a bug in the simulation program ("What do you mean 'in meters'? Didn't we use feet?", a rerouting that had to be done on the fly ("What does it mean 'they're like microwaves, you can't run a stripe around the board twice'?"), some other problem that had to be fixed by bringing certain parameters out of specs ("How, c'mon, don't tell me your PCI card can't hold 101.10 MHz! That's ridiculous!"). Literally tons of things could go wrong. And then maybe they didn't.
"What if" is the key to discovery and to a better understanding.
Hence, let me restate my question: "somebody knows what would happen if we took away the ceramic caps from under the cpu of a z77 board that has to use them (like ASUS's P8Z77)?"
Fanboys please abstain.
Edited by Sredni Vashtar - 7/15/12 at 5:05pm
