GIGABYTE 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 its 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: 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!"