Galaxy Shows off Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard

[btarunr]

Galaxy extended its top-end Hall of Fame (HOF) brand extension to motherboards, and unveiled its flagship socket LGA1150 motherboard, the Z87 HOF. The board uses two PEX8747 x48 bridge chips, probably chained, to give out four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, all four of which stay at electrical x16, no matter how you populate them. The board uses a 16-phase VRM to power the CPU, which draws power from two 8-pin EPS connectors, in addition to the 24-pin ATX. The board takes advantage of its unique PCI-Express configuration to support 4-way SLI and CrossFireX.

Sadly, the board doesn't impress quite as much with storage connectivity. You get four SATA 6 Gb/s ports, an mSATA/mPCIe, and an eSATA. DVI, HDMI, 8-channel HD audio, and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it. The board gives you plenty of overclocking features, such as onboard OC controls, dual-BIOS, voltage measurement-points, an OC module, and a feature-rich UEFI setup program.



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[Deleted member 24505]

Pretty.

Your thread Title should be- Galaxy Shows off Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard not Galaxy Shows [of] Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard btarunr

 

[Ghost]

How is this HOF? It ain't even white :shadedshu

 

[btarunr]

Your thread Title should be- Galaxy Shows off Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard not Galaxy Shows [of] Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard btarunr

I was hungry, so I ate an f.

 

[micropage7]

i dunno, its weird name, maybe someday a manufacture gonna make LOL edition with bright yellow scheme on it

 

[Aquinus]

Yes, and those 64-lanes of PCI-E are still limited by the 16/20 lanes going to the CPU.

 

[btarunr]

Yes, and those 64-lanes of PCI-E are still limited by the 16/20 lanes going to the CPU.

PEX8747, like nForce 200, features broadcast functions. In multi-GPU, each GPU has a full copy of all the data that goes into rendering a scene. PEX8747 takes one copy, and broadcasts it like a radio station downstream. So that x16 bottleneck is not as bad as it seems. Latency could be a problem, and that could lead to stuttering.

 

[RCoon]

I've been waiting for an all black with white accent motherboard for a while now. sadly this means ill have to buy a haswell cpu as well.

 

[Aquinus]

PEX8747, like nForce 200, features broadcast functions. In multi-GPU, each GPU has a full copy of all the textures that go into rendering a scene. PEX8747 takes one copy, and broadcasts it like a radio station downstream. So that x16 bottleneck is not as bad as it seems. Textures are the most bandwidth-sensitive objects in a graphics pipeline.

Okay, I just want to correct your terminology because if you google PEX8747 and broadcast, you get this thread. You mean multicast, not broadcast. (Broadcast implies that all devices get it, multicast determines which of many gets a particular packet,) but I see what you mean. I took a gander at http://www.plxtech.com/download/file/1824

That's really only useful if you're going to have video cards on it and only video cards doing the same thing. I suspect performance would suffer if you had 3 cards and one of them was bitcoin mining or folding or if you put a non-graphics device on it.

Who knows though. I would be interested to see if it could be saturated though and how it compares to having a dedicated 16/8/8/8 on skt2011 versus a shared 16 lanes for 4 cards on this. Clearly you would need a few beefy video cards to saturate that with graphics alone.

I would love to see numbers though.

 

[Fourstaff]

Is it just me or does the board look sparse? Or is this common throughout all the Haswell boards?

 

[btarunr]

Okay, I just want to correct your terminology because if you google PEX8747 and broadcast, you get this thread. You mean multicast, not broadcast. (Broadcast implies that all devices get it, multicast determines which of many gets a particular packet,) but I see what you mean. I took a gander at http://www.plxtech.com/download/file/1824

That's really only useful if you're going to have video cards on it and only video cards doing the same thing. I suspect performance would suffer if you had 3 cards and one of them was bitcoin mining or folding or if you put a non-graphics device on it.

Who knows though. I would be interested to see if it could be saturated though and how it compares to having a dedicated 16/8/8/8 on skt2011 versus a shared 16 lanes for 4 cards on this. Clearly you would need a few beefy video cards to saturate that with graphics alone.

I would love to see numbers though.

Right, multicast, not broadcast. Busy day.

 

[Aquinus]

Is it just me or does the board look sparse? Or is this common throughout all the Haswell boards?

You mean how it only has 4 SATA ports and probably no external SATA chipsets? No extra USB 3.0 controller and probably no extra eSATA controller (right off the PCH maybe?)

It does look a bit feature lean with the exception of the PLX chip.

 

[btarunr]

On the bright side, you can install your single card in any slot without worrying about performance loss.

 

[Maban]

A single 8747 split to four x8 slots would have been nearly identical in performance. The only way I can think of to make two PEX8747 switches equal four x16 slots would be to give each one just eight uplink lanes. I would love to see a Z87 board use a PEX8780 80 port switch to provide four x16 slots with a x16 uplink, just as a why not. An 8780 is likely more than double the price of a 8747, but so what, the people that buy this are already paying top dollar.

 

[blibba]

You mean how it only has 4 SATA ports and probably no external SATA chipsets? No extra USB 3.0 controller and probably no extra eSATA controller (right off the PCH maybe?)

It does look a bit feature lean with the exception of the PLX chip.

It fills a niche, and I guess it's an ideal candidate for a hardware RAID card.

 

[erixx]

Mmm, HOF board. Perfect match for HAF case. Just as the TUF board marries the TOF cases. Temple of Fame, obviously.

 

[blibba]

A single 8747 split to four x8 slots would have been nearly identical in performance. The only way I can think of to make two PEX8747 switches equal four x16 slots would be to give each one just eight uplink lanes.

Good point. Which makes the whole thing pretty misleading really, as in effect it's more like 4*x8.

In fact, with just one card, a single 8747 would have yielded higher performance.

 

[McSteel]

OEM = Gigabyte?

Other than that, mostly uninteresting...

 

[Farmer Boe]

Is this the first motherboard that Galaxy have come out with? Seems rather ambitious if it is indeed their first one. But very interesting

 

[Maban]

A single 8747 split to four x8 slots would have been nearly identical in performance. The only way I can think of to make two PEX8747 switches equal four x16 slots would be to give each one just eight uplink lanes. I would love to see a Z87 board use a PEX8780 80 port switch to provide four x16 slots with a x16 uplink, just as a why not. An 8780 is likely more than double the price of a 8747, but so what, the people that buy this are already paying top dollar.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7043/computex-2013-galaxy-expanding-into-motherboards-psus-ssds

Anandtech says they are using a PEX8780 80 lane switch. Much love to Galaxy for trying this out.

 

[cadaveca]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7043/computex-2013-galaxy-expanding-into-motherboards-psus-ssds

Anandtech says they are using a PEX8780 80 lane switch. Much love to Galaxy for trying this out.

You could tell by the number of surface-mounted components above each slot that they should have been x16 each. The bottom slot looks a bit weird to me though, so I kinda though it might be x16/x16/x16/x8

 

[Maban]

You could tell by the number of surface-mounted components above each slot that they should have been x16 each. The bottom slot looks a bit weird to me though, so I kinda though it might be x16/x16/x16/x8

I knew they were all x16 but I figured it was from two PEX8747's.

I count sixteen pairs of caps on the last slot. It's definitely quad x16.