Event Coverage

Computex Taipei 2006 - Part 4

By Zachary Chan - 8 Jun 2006

Gigabyte's Booth

Gigabyte's Booth

Gigabyte's booth had a much larger focus on the new Intel Broadwater platform than most.

Gigabyte has a full family of Intel's P965 and G965 chipset motherboards ranging from the highest enthusiast model to the lowest denominated by Gigabyte's 6-Quad and S-Series technologies.

The top-end GA-965P-DQ6 sports the P965 chipset with ICH8R Southbridge and dual PCIe x16 slots. Its 6-Quad classification refers to its quad piece heat-pipe, elaborate quad BIOS protection and crazy quad-triple phase power design (that's twelve of course). Gigabyte is also touting their new fully solid Conductive Polymer Aluminum capacitors, so there should never be any leakage – ever.

One step down, there is the GA-965P-DS4. Besides its lack of the 6-Quad features, this board is basically identical to the GA-965P-DQ6. Dual PCIe x16 slots, eight SATA 3.0Gbps with RAID, Gigabit LAN and FireWire-400 support are available. It also features an 8-channel HD Audio, but no DTS or Dolby support. Gigabyte also has a mainstream GA-965P-DS3 board that features the ICH8 Southbridge instead of the ICH8R and only comes with one PCIe x16 slot.

The GA-965G-DS4 is the highest end integrated graphics board based on the G965 chipset featuring Intel's new GMA X3000. It shares identical qualities with the GA-965P-DS4 above except for IGP chipset. There is no 6-Quad version of the G965 boards.

The GA-965G-DS3 is the mainstream edition with the ICH8 Southbridge, comes with two less SATA ports and only features one PCIe x16 slot for external graphics. Gigabyte also has a low end G965 board created for the micro ATX form factor, the GA-965G-DS2.

Besides the new Broadwater motherboards, Gigabyte also has a line-up for the Intel 946 series chipsets to support Core 2 Duo processors. The GA-946GZ-DS3 seen here is the 946GZ model with GMA 3000 and ICH7 Southbridge. There is also a GA-946PL-DS3 that only uses discrete graphics.

 

Core 2 Duo and the latest Intel platforms aren't the only things on display. Gigabyte also showed some low powered mini-ITX boards (GA-C7V7) using VIA's CN700 Uni Chrome chipset with VIA C7 processors.

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