14 DAY TRIAL // Gigabyte has recently announced the introduction of its fourth version of the Ultra Durable technology, which is based on the company's previous UD3 design, enhanced to address the problems of humidity, electrostatic discharge, high temperature, and power surge.
According to Gigabyte, the problem of humidity was resolved by using a new fiberglass PCB material, that provides better insulation and helps reduce the corrosion of the PCB contacts against moisture.
This new fiberglass material is paired together with integrated controllers (ICs) specially designed to be highly resistant to ESD (electrostatic discharge) as well as with an active surge protection system, which relies not just on fuses but on an IC to deliver added protection.
One of Gigabyte's very first motherboards based on the Ultra Durable 4 design is the GA-H61M-DS2, a micro-ATX socket LGA1155 solution based on the Intel H61 chipset.
This board features PCI Express Gen 3 slots, is ready for the upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processors, and includes the HybridEFI BIOS that lets you boot from volumes bigger than 2.2 TB in size.
The rest of its feature set isn't as impressive as it sports only four SATA 3Gbps ports, no eSATA or USB 3.0 connectivity, while also lacking anything more advanced than a VGA video output.
No details regarding the price set by Gigabyte for the GA-H61M-DS2 are available, but the board is already listed on the company's website.
Gigabyte has introduced the Ultra Durable moniker a few years back in order to differentiate the boards which included only solid-state capacitors from its regular models.
This technology later evolved into UD2, which improved upon the previous design by using Ferrite Core chokes, while Ultra Durable 3 added additional copper layers to the PCB to help improve signaling, grounding, and cooling. (via TechPowerUp)