Gigabyte - The Power House

Gigabyte doesn't shy away from mobos, but the company definitely has a lot more cooking.

I talked about Gigabyte's ATI-happy booth here . I forgot to mention that they were the only ones with a Radeon 8500XT board (300 MHz core and memory clock with video-in).

Rockson Chiang of Gigabyte stands in front of the company's expanding array of server products.

The company's SR-125 caught our attention at Interops the first time around. This time it dominated the server area of the Gigabyte booth. At Interop, we had also checked out the range of switches and routers the company has to offer. Of course, they are Gigabit switches.

Gigabyte also has strong ambitions in the networking segment of the market.

On the mobo front, Gigabyte is pinning its hopes on the 850E, where it is using the ICH4 chipset, and differentiating its product based on its engineering. Otherwise, they expect stable KT400 boards in July, and are recommending Samsung memory for the 400 crowd, but expect most people to run 333 memory for the most part. Gigabyte is also hot on the SiS648 in the third and fourth quarter, and will be adding its overclocking features to the 845G to get DDR333 out of its boards. Nice touch right there, and it'll be no mean feat to get it done right.

The company is obviously on board with the K8, although it foresees the present emphasis on the next generation from AMD hurting existing K7 sales, which no one wants to think about in this tight market.