Is Mini-DTX Viable? Why No RAM Drives? And Why Lime Green?
Q. There's been a lot of talk about switching to BGA sockets especially from Intel, I'm not a fan of that happening since I like to be able to build my own computer. Will Gigabyte continue to make LGA socket based motherboards or do you have no choice but to go with BGA? Is AMD onboard with BGA ? If AMD is not going to go that way could that force Intel to change their plans?
A. I think there was some confusion earlier in the year about this. Intel is still committed to socketed CPUs and we will continue to focus on socketed motherboards for the retail channel.
Q. I have always loved the idea of an external GPU housing. I would love the ability to have a road warrior laptop that I could plug into a massive external power hungry GPU and big monitor at home. I know Gigabyte has done some work with external GPU's in the past. Are there any other plans to pursue external GPU technology?
A. This would be a question for our VGA team. We have notebook solutions that use an external graphics dock but I don't believe we currently have a solution on our VGA side. I'll pass along your suggestion though, as I agree, it would make a pretty cool way to boost your graphics performance.
Q. Are there any plans in the future to make am3+ mITX boards?
A. We just launched our FM2 mini-ITX motherboard, and we are investigating the possibility of doing more small form fact motherboards for different AMD platforms.
Q. Why the lime-green color on the high-end 'Killer' series of boards? I've always liked the features (and pricing's usually acceptable). Does Gigabyte plan on expanding the range of colors for high-end boards (the orange in the OC Haswell boards are interesting), or perhaps a complete color change like ASUS and MSI have done with some of their boards?
A. Color scheme is such a personal preference :) . The reason we did green is all of our competitors seemed to do red for that segment, and we wanted to differentiate ourselves. I think this 8 series launch, we’ll have a wide variety of colors that hopefully will appeal to as many different tastes as possible. We have some green/black, orange/black, red/black, gold/black, blue/black. We are always open to hear suggestions.
Q. Will Gigabyte make a DDR3 ramdisk around pci-e w/ like a port or ports for storage backups be it SD, USB, SATA, or all of the above?
A. Generally speaking, Ramdisks were popular at a time when mechanical hard drives were a serious bottleneck for extreme systems. But in the age of SSDs we see very little demand for Ramdisks. This especially true now that we've seen SSDs become cheaper and more accessible in the last year or so.
Q. The Mini-DTX motherboard form-factor is compatible with many mini-ITX chassis on the market, while potentially enabling the use of a sound card and GPU, or even SLI/Crossfire via its second PCIe slot. Does Gigabyte see a future in this "mini-ITX plus" form-factor, and do you have any plans to produce boards based on Mini-DTX?
A. It's interesting to hear someone talk about D-ITX again. I think the DIY PC market today , broadly speaking, is largely maintaining three form factor eco-systems; ATX, Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX. This means that chassis vendors in particular are developing products for these three form factors. Mini-DTX sits in a very niche position, between Mini and Micro and thus never really achieved a stable eco-system. I can see the benefits as you explained, but for a form factor to really survive, it needs the support of the broader PC component industry.
