Limited Edition Gigabyte Hardware with Gold Tags shown during Computex

I am no stranger to limited edition hardware.  In fact, Ninjalane (and Hardware Asylum) were established to explore the world of hard to get computer hardware including ultra rare overclocking boards to unique designs that may only be available to certain customers or specific worldwide regions.

Well, it would seem that a new player has entered the ring in the form of a 1 of 300 special release of the RTX 4080 Super and Z790 Xtreme X Ice and these products were being shown with individually numbered gold plates. 

Gigabyte claims these are pure gold and every board released in this series has already been spoken for including this RTX 4080 Super that was signed by Jensen Huang as he was doing his “Baby Kissing Tour” throughout the Computex venue. 

As you can imagine it is never a Gigabyte booth visit without checking out the latest motherboards.  On display was a series of next generation Intel boards including a personal favorite the Gen-Z Tachyon Ice.

This board features a rotated socket orientation (similar to what EVGA did on the Dark Series) support for dual GPUs with PCI Express slot armor, onboard overclocking controls and a very unique connector for the onboard Wifi Antenna.

With the downfall of EVGA, it seems that Gigabyte may be the only motherboard maker to actively support overclocking with specialized hardware.

The ICE color scheme, or white for anyone with a brain, was extremely popular at the Gigabyte booth including their new B650 “Stealth” motherboard with rearward facing cable connections. 

I’m still of the opinion that rear facing cable connections are better served in the OEM market but, there are other enthusiasts that swear by them along with the benefit of their vape pen.  The new Project stealth has been done extremely well with decorative covers across every exposed PCB surface to not only hide the through-hole solder joints but, to provide the board with a very clean look. 

AI hardware and software occupied more than half of the Gigabyte booth space.  Their new system was called AI Top and encompassed specialized hardware and a software package designed to help AI administrators to train / re-train their modules using an interface they designed in-house.

When it comes to hardware there were several products on display including the popular TRX50 supporting up to 4 graphics cards and eight DIMM slots and the matching RTX 4070 Ti Super with a dual slot cooler that looks like something from the GTX 260 days  (look it up if you made it this far)

I find comfort knowing that the design efforts put forth during the Overclocking days has not gone to waste.  We are once again seeing boards with multi GPU support and while the processor may have changed the extreme nature of AI hardware will create some amazing boards in the near future.