The first thing some of you may be wondering is "what will happen to the UD series?", and the short answer is that it will largely co-exist alongside the UP series. The UD series will still use the traditional MOSFET currently employed by Gigabyte on their mainboards, while the UP series will enjoy the new IR3550 MOSFET.
Yesterday we saw the UP5, UP7 and a whole bunch of other boards in Gigabytes executive suite in Taipei 101. Today we can show you some of those images, and begin to explain some of the new features also included with the UP series.
Beyond the cooling benefits of the IR3550 MOSFET, we also see a slightly chunkier heatsink utilised on the UP5 series motherboard. Gigabyte have gone for the double-whammy of a cooler chip, and greater heat dissipation.
As many of you will notice, the GA-X79S-UP5 and 7 series motherboards have a phenomenal SATA and SAS connectivity; this is due to the X79S chipset (also known as C606) instead of the regular consumer X79 chipset. This chip is designed for server use, however it has been tweaked by Gigabyte to still perform well under overclocked conditions. This allows users to enjoy high storage capacity without the need for extra SATA or RAID cards.
Gigabyte will also be launching these UP series board with ThunderBolt, and as seen in our pictures boards will be available all the way down to the UP3 series. For those of you wondering why Gigabyte only included two ThunderBolt ports, the easy answer is because you can actually "daisy chain" up to 12 ThunderBolt devices from the two ports without any bandwidth loss.
We were shown a real-time technical demo of a ThunderBolt connected SSD. Which was able to render and edit three full HD streams in real time, while a conventional SATA 3 SSD struggled to edit a single stream in real time (both scenarios used the same i7 3770K and Nvidia Quadro GPU).
We will have a whole mess of information on the IR3550 upon our return to Australia, along with the brand new UP series; refresh models of the UD series, and a brand new business-focussed motherboard range as well. Gigabyte has been busy, and we can't wait to get stuck in
