ICT magazine

GIGABYTE UNITED INC., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced its commitment to greener motherboards and VGA cards as part of the hardware giant’s 2008 new year’s resolution. The move follows a remarkable turnaround for GIGABYTE who has led the trend towards better quality PC components ever since the adoption of ROHS manufacturing practices in 2005. The rest of the industry has been following GIGABYTE’s example ever since, and the company is hoping that this will continue to be the case with it’s latest green computing initiative - 20% better power efficiency across all new motherboard product lines in 2008.

On October 25th, 2005 GIGABYTE announced the world’s first ROHS motherboard based on the popular Intel 945P Express chipset. Six months later GIGABYTE announced the Ultra Durable motherboard series based on the Intel® P965 Express chipset and featuring all-solid capacitors with better power efficiency than old style electrolytic capacitors. With the availability of the Intel Bearlake chipsets in May 2007 GIGABYTE introduced the Ultra Durable 2 series of motherboards that boasted top quality environmentally friendly solid capacitors from Japan, Low RDS (On) MOSFETs that run cooler and Ferrite core chokes that help to reduce the amount of wasted electricity from the power phases that feed the CPU.

With manufacturing facilities and the head office based in Taiwan, GIGABYTE adheres to increasingly strict manufacturing and harmful emissions regulations that are not in place in most other regions of Asia. Going hand in hand with ROHS compliance, GIGABYTE complies internationally with WEEE directive that limits the negative effects of the disposal of electronic equipment. Furthermore, in a conscious effort to reduce waste, GIGABYTE has recently increased the tolerance level for recycling of onboard components on RMA (Return Material Authorization) goods, i.e. the company will allocate more resources to repairing damaged components rather than simply replacing them. Additional quality and environmental certificates can be found on the GIGABYTE corporate website: http://tw.giga-byte.com/Company/CompanyList.aspx?CompanyWebPageID=3

“The writing is on the wall and we all know that we have to help slow down global warming in order to ensure our future business; it’s just a matter of who’s going to take the first step and set the example,” said Henry Kao, Senior VP of International Sales and Marketing, GIGABYTE UNITED INC. “Green computing is the way of the future and hardware vendors who want to succeed in tomorrow’s markets need to plan accordingly. We don’t mind being first if it makes good business sense!”

Leading by example begins at home, and so GIGABYTE has introduced numerous environmentally friendly initiatives at it’s offices in Taiwan. These include:
1. Turning off office lights during lunch breaks
2. Encouraging employees to shut down their PCs during lunch breaks
3. Running only one lift during off peak hours rather than all of the lifts
4. Rewarding individual departments for shutting down the air conditioning and lights in meeting rooms when not in use
5. Converting to an online application and approval system to reduce paper usage
6. Recycling of printer/photocopier paper
7. Encouraging employees to use resource efficient forms of communication such as MSN messenger or Skype to keep in touch with branch offices, customers and media
8. Reusing cardboard boxes for sending customer and media samples
9. Recycling waste within office and factory buildings

GIGABYTE is expected to announce a new range of motherboards that employ proprietary energy saving technologies in early 2008. Interested parties can read the announcement on the official GIGABYTE website on January 4th: http://tw.giga-byte.com/News/Motherboard/News_List.aspx