Gigabyte Shows Off its Graphics Card Line-up

At last week’s CES, I met up with our good friends at Gigabyte to see all of what was new from the company for Q1, and as you could expect, there were many, many motherboards, and likewise, many graphics cards. I’ll focus on the GPU side of things here, and as you can see below, the company had a rather modest collection to show off. Gigabyte has been a little quiet with graphics cards for a while, but over the past year, it has begun to devote more of a focus to its line-up, however, so we should be able to expect a wide gamut of models in the future.

Because the company doesn’t simply want to deliver a card that looks like most of the others on the market, it has delved deep into its idea bucket to find out what it is that gamers, and overclockers, are looking for. For both of these crowds, Gigabyte has recently launched its “Super Overclock” series, which essentially amounts to models that are really overclocked. We took a look at the company’s GTX 260 SO a few months ago and were left very impressed.

During our meeting, Gigabyte reiterated the reasons why its Super Overclock cards are so special, and the main one is thanks to something called the “GPU Gauntlet”. This is essentially an advanced sorting process, with only the highest-binned parts making their way into a Super Overclock part. That would explain the reasons why Gigabyte’s SO parts are the highest-clocked on the market, at least up to this point.

So far, the company has focused on NVIDIA parts for its SO series, but it has ATI cards coming up, including the HD 5870, which you can see in the front in the image below, second from the right. Also on display was the company’s GeForce GT 240, which you can see in the back to the right, sporting an interesting silver-techy cooler, which our Gigabyte rep nicknamed the “Transformer’s cooler”. On the opposite end of the table was another GPU with a strange black cooler, which she also nicknamed… “Batman”. After taking a look at them both, you can really understand why.

In addition to all of the models featured here, Gigabyte also talked about the other enhancements they make to their GPU line-up, in particular with what’s called the Ultra Durable VGA, which I’m sure most of our visitors are familiar with at this point in time. Essentially, these GPUs feature 2oz of copper, like the company’s motherboards, premium memory, Japanese solid capacitors , Low RDS(on) MOSFETs and Ferrite Core Chokes. If you own a Gigabyte motherboard, these will all sound very familiar.

After taking a look at Gigabyte’s GTX 260 Super Overclock, and walking away so impressed, I hope to get in one of its upcoming Radeon SO cards, as I can’t help but be curious to see just how far it’s going to push these already very powerful GPUs.