Computex 2014 - Day 1

Computex 2014 - Gigabyte

Our next stop was at Gigabyte's stand, where the Intel 9-series chipsets were the name of the game. Gigabyte splits its motherboard range into three main areas – Gaming, Ultra Durable and Overclocking. Showing its commitment to the latter category, the company has just launched the GA-Z97-SOC Force LN2, which is designed specifically for overclockers dedicated to liquid nitrogen cooling. As such, only a few hundred will be made. The mtherboard has no CPU cooler mounting holes (these aren't needed for LN2 cooling) and it only features two DRAM slots, which are positioned closer to the CPU than usual so as to reduce latency – in competitive overclocking, things like this can actually make an important difference.


Gigabyte was also keen to show off its Black Edition motherboards, which are marked by a '-BK' suffix on the product name. Black Edition motherboards don't vary in terms of specifications when compared to the boards they're based on (e.g. GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK vs. GA-Z97X-UD5H), but the Black Edition motherboards are put through an incredibly demanding server-grade stress test so that the finest samples can be hand picked for the range. Users of BK motherboards are given a five year warranty instead of the normal three, and they are also able to register their product to obtain unique information about how it performed during testing and also to enter a competition where the winning entrant will receive a free trip to Computex 2015 (make sure you come and say hello next year if it happens to be you!).

Gigabyte also informed us that UK users will be receiving an exclusive four year warranty for the Gaming range of motherboards, again instead of the standard three.


Finally, Gigabyte was also showing off its new Aorus brand (above), which covers gaming notebooks and peripherals. These include the Thunder M7 MMO gaming mouse and the Thunder K7 mechanical keyboard with a detachable num pad that can be fixed to the right hand side of the keyboard should you so desire. There was also the X7 notebook featuring dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPUs – it's a product that Gigabyte claims is the thinnest (22.9mm) and lightest (3kg) GTX SLI laptop available.