Gigabyte

Gigabyte continues its innovative streak this year, announcing a new solid state storage solution called 'i-RAM'. Taking the form of a PCI card, 'i-RAM' supports regular DDR modules up to a capacity of 4GB. This won't replace the 300GB+ hard drive available today any time soon, but it's still extremely useful for applications that require quick I/O speeds.

Using a regular SATA hard drive, in DiskSpeed 32 we recorded an average transfer speed of 42,817KB/sec. However, using Gigabyte solid state storage we recorded an average speed of 117,067KB/sec.

Gigabyte also had a new security product on display, dubbed 'i-Touch'. This is basically a fingerprint reader for system security, and features IEEE1394 and USB 2.0 ports for added convenience.

Next up is the GC-TVDA-F tv tuner, which supports both digital (DVB-T) and analog (PAL) TV streams. It comes with a handy remote to allow for convenient viewing from a distance, and supports time shifting functionality.

Furthering Gigabyte's home theatre PC focus is the HA91 PVR system, which supports both HDD and DVD recording. This is undoubtedly a trend at Computex 2005.

VGA-wise, Gigabyte also has a new dual-core graphics card, dubbed 'GV-3D1-68GT'. With two nVidia 6800GT cores and 512MB DDR3 memory, we're definitely looking forward to checking out its gaming performance. We were told by Gigabyte it scores around 20,000 marks in 3DMark03.

Gigabyte had various motherboards on display, but due to time constraints we're only able to cover one here. The GA-8VT880P Combo is based on the VIA PT880 Pro and supports both AGP and PCI-Express graphics cards. This could prove highly desirable for those that aren't quite ready to make the jump to PCI-E.

Finally, Gigabyte is moving into cases with its first product all aluminum GZ-FSCA1-ANG.