Gigabyte: Graphics And Notebooks
Gigabyte put a lot of emphasis on its USB 3.0-based offerings, showing off 35 models with new interface. According to the company, it has already shipped more than one million motherboards with USB 3.0 onboard.
Gigabyte also showed off its new Radeon HD 5870 SOC in the company's Super Overclock line. As you can tell by its name, this line is targeted at overclockers. Gigabyte uses five NEC Proadlizers on this card, also known as film capacitors, to provide good current capacity up to 5,000 uF and extremely low ESL/ESR for what it claims is enhanced overclocking ability. Five times the standard capacitance indicates the amount of electric energy stored is fivefold. By placing five Proadlizers around the GPU, electric currents are charged and discharged rapidly to support higher clock rates.
The card also has a voltage read point, so you can measure actual voltage, which is important for precise overclocking. GPUs for this series are manually binned, so only the most overclockable chips are used.
Gigabyte also plans to introduce a GeForce GTX 470 card in its Super Overclock series in the near future.
We were also interested in Gigabyte's new M1405 notebook. At first glance, it's little more than a compact model with Intel's ULV Core 2 Duo processor. But it has a couple of interesting feature. Its Smat technologies are an example. Smart Charge allows you limit the amount of battery that can be used to charge external devices. So, if the battery hits a certain percentage, power to USB ports can be cut off. Smart Docking technology allows you to replace the optical drive with an additional battery. And we should mention Gigabyte's external docking station, which adds a GeForce GT 220 GPU inexpensively (about $150). So, you can easily add graphics performance when it is needed.
