Gigabyte Suite at Computex 2014, Mountains of Motherboards

Gigabyte Gaming Motherboards

As we had already covered most of what Gigabyte already had to announce from their new 9 series motherboards at the beginning of Computex, we were interested to see exactly what Gigabyte had to show us at their suite on the 36th floor of Taipei 101 (somewhere about 1/3 of the way up).

After we got to their suite, we were greeted by Gigabyte’s Irene Huang, who graciously showed us around Gigabyte’s suite and introduced us to their full line of motherboards that they had announced earlier in the week. The first thing that caught our attention was Gigabyte’s walls of motherboards, with their new Ultra Durable line of boards to our right hand side. This Ultra Durable wall included both new 9 series boards as well as some older boards for AMD.

As you can tell, Gigabyte has a multitude of Ultra Durable boards ranging from full ATX boards all the way down to Mini-ITX. After they showed us their Ultra Durable boards, Gigabyte explained to us about their Black Edition boards, which are their premium boards that are tested for 168 hours under extreme conditions under a constantly changing series of tests. These boards are designed to last longer because they’ve already been stress tested and they ultimately are awarded a 5 year warranty if they pass Gigabyte’s rigorous testing. According to company, the expectation is that these boards will only sell for about $20 USD more than the standard Ultra Durable or gaming boards that are made into Black Edition boards. And for that kind of price premium, I have a feeling many people are going to happily pay the price knowing that their boards are likely going to last forever. These may, however, end up getting snapped up by system integrators that know that these boards are far less likely to fail than any other motherboard on the market, making their jobs easier. Following that, we checked out Gigabyte’s Gaming line of motherboards, including a few interesting case mods that featured their latest Z97 boards, including a pretty attractive looking Z97 Mini-ITX board.

They also had a 3 monitor car racing setup in their suite, which was powered by a modded system, pictured below.

Meanwhile, all the time that we were going around Gigabyte’s suite their overclockers were busy using LN2 and prepping their boards for some world records. In fact, I believe they broke a record that day while at the suite, besting their previous record of 4.5 GHz DDR3 clock speed on Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC motherboard. They were using Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC and the Z97X-SOC Force boards to do some overclocking, both of which are some of Gigabyte’s newest overclocking motherboards. One not pictured, but used often during the week was the Z97X-SOC Force LN2 motherboard, which is a special board that only has two DIMM slots and no CPU mounting holes. This board is especially created for breaking memory clock speeds and CPU overclocking, which explains why Gigabyte continues to crush the memory clock speed world record. In fact, that speed was set at Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) event during Computex 2014 using Kingston’s DDR3 2933 MHz memory where Gigabyte’s team took first place.