Gigabyte Technology
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| Type | Hardware Manufacturer |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1986 |
| Headquarters |  Taipei, Taiwan |
| Key people | Pei-Chen Yeh(Chairman) Ming-Hsiung Liu(Vice chairman) |
| Industry | Computer industry |
| Products | Motherboards Graphics Cards Notebooks PDAs |
| Website | www.gigabyte.com.tw |
GIGABYTE Technology (traditional Chinese: 技嘉科技股份有限公司) is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of computer hardware products best known for its motherboards. The company is publicly held and traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (2376.TW).
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[edit] Company
Established in 1986, its major customers include custom boutique PC manufacturers such as Alienware and Falcon Northwest. Google recently revealed they use GIGABYTE motherboards in the custom servers. The chairman of the company is Yeh Pei-Cheng. GIGABYTE is considered a Tier 1 motherboard manufacturer (based on units sold) along with MSI, ECS and Asustek. They shipped approximately 19 million motherboards in 2008 (16 million of them branded).[citation needed]
[edit] Products
In addition to the design and manufacture of motherboards hosting AMD and Intel processors, the company also makes graphics cards built around the ATI Technologies and NVIDIA GPUs, such as the GeForce GTX280 and Radeon HD 4870.
Secondary lines in the company's product portfolio include complete PCs, laptops, optical drives, LCD monitors, keyboards, mice, cooling components, mobile phones and high end mobile phone products (PDA phone, TV phone etc.), networking equipment, power supplies, and a line of barebone mid and full sized ATX computer cases.
[edit] Motherboard naming conventions
GIGABYTE use a special system for naming their motherboards. For example the GA-P35-DS3R. The first segment, GA, simply denotes that it's manufactured by GIGABYTE. The second segment indicates what chipset it is using, in this case Intel's P35. The third part shows what features the motherboard has. This segment mostly contains a number of abbreviations.
Available 1st segment abbreviations:If "M" appears behind the chipset code, it is a mATX board. Available 1st segment abbreviations:If "M" appears in front of the chipset number it means it is for an AMD processor, but has a non-AMD chipset. If the abbreviation in front of the chipset is "MA", it is for an AMD processor and has an AMD chipset.
Available 2nd segment abbreviations:
- E - (Dynamic Energy Saver) - Energy saving features
- T - Only DDR3 SDRAM support
- C - Both DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM support
- No T or C abbreviations mean that the motherboard only has DDR2 SDRAM support.
Available 3rd segment abbreviations:
- D (Durability) - Indicates that the motherboard uses only solid state capacitors.
- UD (Ultra Durable 3) - Introduces 2 ounces of copper for both the Power and Ground layers.
- S2 (Smart, Safe) - Various features such as Q-Flash BIOS etc.
- S3 (Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but includes overclocking features.
- S4 (Silent Pipe, Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but uses heat pipe cooling.
- S5 (CrossFire, Silent Pipe, Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but with CrossFire support.
- Q6 (Quad BIOS, Quad Cooling, Quad E-SATA2, Quad Triple Phase, Quad-Core Optimized, Quad DDR2 Slots) - Indicates quad-core optimiziation.
Available 4th segment abbreviations:
- R - 2 extra SATAII ports and possibly RAID support. No FireWire ports. No ATI CrossFire support. (i.e GA-P35-DS3R)
- G - Solid capacitors for the CPU Volt Regulator Module.
- H - HDMI port.
- L - Probably "Lite". Fewer SATAII ports. No RAID support. No FireWire ports. No ATI CrossFire support. Heatsink cooling. (i.e GA-P35-DS3L). It could also indicate Gigabit LAN (as in GA-G31M-S2L, versus GA-G31M-S2C which has support for 10/100Mbps Ethernet).
- P - Silent Pipe, RAID, Extra PCI Express slots, extra SATAII ports. (i.e GA-EP45-DS3P)
[edit] External links
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