Talk of motherboards and other PC components might not be the most exciting (or it could be…), but chances are your ears have to perk up to hear Gigabyte has a new, “fully certified” motherboard equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports.
The 7-series motherboards by Gigabyte will allow users to connect up to 12 devices (6 daisy chained devices per Thunderbolt port) and make use of up to 10 Gbps of bi-directional data transfer (again, per port). Want some real-world numbers to chew on? How about a normal length 1080p video in 30 seconds and 1 TB of data in 5 minutes. Yeah. That’s fast. Furthermore, video professionals will appreciate keeping their main machine’s hard drives relatively sparse by keeping HD content/work material on external Thunderbolt drives.
Thunderbolt grew out of Intel’s “Light Peak” technology and has actually been part of Apple’s computer lineup for around a year now. Thus far, however, adoption has been quite low, especially on the Windows/PC side of things. Even now only a small handful of Thunderbolt peripherals are available. Because of the low popularity, prices remain high. But with Gigabyte (and other manufacturers confirmed to be getting into the Thunderbolt game), look for the number of Thunderbolt accessories to quickly rise as consumers embrace the super fast, highly robust spec that can handle anything from hard drives to monitors.
Check out the videos below to get some more info on Gigabyte’s new 7-series motherboards as well as Thunderbolt tech in general.
Video 1
Video 2
Via: HardwareHeaven
