Gigabyte Technology

Gigabyte Technology 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).

Company

Established in 1986, its major customers include custom boutique PC manufacturers such as Alienware and Falcon Northwest. The chairman of the company is Yeh Pei-Cheng.

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.

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 Intels P35. The third part is the most interesting one, it shows what features the motherboard has. This segment mostly contains a number of abbrevations.

Available 2nd segment abbrevations:

E - Energy saving features
T - Only DDR3 support
C - Both DDR2 and DDR3 support

Available 3rd segment abbrevations:

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 abbrevations:

R - 2 extra SATA2 ports and possibly RAID, no firewire, no crossfire (ie P35-DS3R)
G - Solid capacitors for the CPU Volt Regulator Module
H - HDMI port
L - Probably "Lite". Less SATA2. No raid, firewire, crossfire. Heatsink cooling. (ie P35-DS3L)
P - Silent pipe, Raid, Extra pci-e, extra sata (ie ep45-ds3p)