Review : Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook

Taiwanese company Gigabyte debuts the world's lightest Ultrabook

The Gigabyte X11 is a new 11.6-inch Ultrabook from Taiwanese company Gigabyte that, thanks to its solid carbon fibre shell, enjoys the distinction of the being the lightest Ultrabook on Earth. For now.

You'd be forgiven for not having heard of Gigabyte until now – the company is notable for producing motherboards and graphics cards for other manufacturers. That looks set to change, however, with the launch of the Gigabyte X11 and its big brother the Gigabyte U2442.

Taking more than a few cues from the likes of Formula 1, the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook sports a carbon fibre weave pattern with a lacquered coating to prevent scratches and marks covering the chassis.

As you can see from our pictures, though, that doesn't prevent smudgy fingerprints from covering the lid in a matter of seconds. At 975g, it's incredibly light – a full 105g lighter than a MacBook Air.

Gigabyte has kept it thin as well, measuring 17mm at the rear and then tapering down to 3mm at the front.

Inside the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook you'll find a Chiclet-style keyboard and a glass multi-gesture touchpad with integrated buttons. During our brief spell with the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook, the keyboard responded well, with very soft-touch keys with a surprising amount of travel.

The keys are slightly smaller than on an average Ultrabook, because of the smaller dimensions.

Those smaller dimensions are excellent for portability, but limit the connectivity you'll find on the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook. Ports are limited to two USB 3.0 connections, a Mini DisplayPort output and microSD slot next to the headphone jack.

Internally, things look the way you would expect at premium Ultrabook level. The latest third-generation Ivy Bridge processors will offer excellent performance at both Core i5 and Core i7 level, backed with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD.

Unfortunately, there's no discrete graphics on offer here. Intel's HD Graphics 4000 integrated GPU will handle graphical tasks such as watching HD videos or light gaming.

In terms of HD video, the 1366 x 768 pixel resolution on the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook's screen will limit you to 720p HD content. This could become a sticking point in the long term. Given the recent leaps made by Apple and Asus in screen resolutions, we anticipate it becoming more important as Ultrabooks continue to develop.

The Gigabyte U2442, the 14-inch big brother to the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook, takes this into account, with an HD+ pixel count.

During our brief inspection, however, the screen on the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook appeared bright and markedly crisp. The glossy coating didn't do it many favours in the bright light of the showroom. We quickly noticed the reflections that mark the inevitable trade-off with these kinds of screens.

There's also no getting away from the decidedly chunky black bezel that edges the screen. Whether or not an 11.6-inch Ultrabook is ideal for multimedia content anyway comes down to personal preference, although the benefit of the integrated high fidelity speakers was quite clear as soon as we switched on a test video.

We spoke to a Gigabyte representative who confirmed a battery life of around five hours under benchmark tests, and pointed out that the Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook spent all day running game demos at the recent Gamescon conference in Cologne without needing a charge.

We'll be able to put that to the test with our own benchmarks in our forthcoming full Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook review.

The Gigabyte X11 will arrive in the UK in mid-September, with a suggested retail price of £999 (around $1,580) – giving retailers the scope to change the price if they wish. Stay tuned to TechRadar for the full Gigabyte X11 Ultrabook review, coming as soon as we get our hands on a test sample.

Posted by Unknown Thursday, August 30, 2012

Gigabyte X11: A Featherweight Carbon Fibre Ultrabook

Summary: Gigabyte, best known for motherboards and graphics cards, has a stable of notebooks to which it has just added an extremely slim and lightweight ultrabook.

Taiwanese PC components producer Gb noticeable the UK release of what it calling "the least heavy graphite ultrabook on earth" with a meeting these days at the Churchill War Areas, a Globe War II-era govt sand below Westminster.

At just 975g, Gigabyte's 11.6-inch X11 is certainly less heavy than perhaps the top Ivy Link ultrabook up to now, the Asus Zenbook Primary UX21A, which is 1.1kg. Apple's newest 11.6in. MacBook Air, another apparent evaluation, is 1.08kg.

Clearly the X11's light-but-strong graphite framework underlies Gigabyte's capability to advantage out the 11.6in. competitors on bodyweight — just as Lenovo's X1 As well as does in the 14in. ultrabook industry. Like the Mac laptop Air, the X11 tapers to sharp 3mm at the top side, with a highest possible width of 16.5mm (just within the Air's 17mm). The X11 certainly seems featherlight in the part, while the 'woven' complete to the lid looks elegant — although the bright area does choose up finger prints.

Built around Intel's third-generation (Ivy Bridge) Primary i5 (3317U) or Primary i7 (3517U) processor chips, both with incorporated HD Design 4000 GPUs, the X11 comes with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 128GB SATA III (6Gbps) solid-state generate (a 256GB choice will also be available in due course, according to Gigabyte). Further storage space can be included via a smartphone-style microSD greeting credit card port. This port is on the right-hand part, together with a microphone/headphone combination port and a USB 2.0 port. The left-hand part has a Mini-DisplayPort, a USB 3.0 port and the energy feedback port.

Conenctivity is all wifi — 2.4GHz (802.11b/g/n) Wi-Fi and Wireless bluetooth 4.0 — because, as on most ultrabooks, there's no incorporated RJ-45 Ethernet port.

The 11.6in. LED backlit show has a excellent of 1,366 by 768 p. It's quite bright, which is not to some preferences, but the picture excellent seemed excellent enough on our brief associate with the laptop computer. The display has a solid-feeling metal depend that journeys returning to an position of about 135 levels. There's a 1.3-megapixel photographic camera in the regular mid-top-bezel place.

We didn't have enough entering time with the isolation-style key pad to create a company reasoning, and the same goes for the huge 'glass fibre' multi touch touch pad.

The Gb X11 has a recommended cost of £1,000 (inc. VAT) and will be available from Sept.

Also on perspective from Gb these days was the 14in. U2442, a 1.57kg Primary i5/i7 ultraportable with double integrated/discrete GPUs, the latter complimentary of Nvidia's 2GB GeForce GT 640M. We'll have more on this promising-looking program — and, of course on the X11 — when we get a evaluation example.

Posted by Unknown Friday, August 24, 2012

Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Super OverClock

Enjoying Tahiti's "half birthday" last 30 days, AMD relaunched its Radeon HD 7970 with a factory-overclocked "GHz Edition" that improved the referrals design's primary time amount from 925MHz to 1GHz with the objective of enabling the organization to declare it provided the quickest GPU. Unfortunately, the celebrations were short-lived for several factors.

Not only was it already possible to buy an HD 7970 operating at 1GHz and even well beyond that amount, but AMD wasn't really able to nab the efficiency top returning from Nvidia as the HD 7970 GHz Version and the GTX 680 are about equivalent. Furthermore, it was difficult to get thrilled about such a minor consistency push when it's associated with a $50 cost increase.

Gigabyte has taken issues into its own arms with the new HD 7970 SOC (Super OverClock) card, which seems to be far more exciting than AMD's remedy. With five lovers, nine heatpipes and a king-sized steam stage, one might consider the HD 7970 SOC to be overkill, and to that we say "hell yes!" Our inner fanatic has a penchant for all factors incorrect -- even if they're challenging to suggest from a value viewpoint. Let's shift on and see what Gigabyte's top quality providing has.

Posted by Unknown Friday, July 27, 2012