Gigabyte Technology
 Gigabyte Technology Laptop | |
Native name | 技嘉科技 |
|---|---|
Type | Public company |
| Traded as | TWSE: 2376 |
| Industry | Computer hardware Electronics |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Founder | Pei-Chen Yeh |
| Headquarters | Xindian District, New Taipei City , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Pei-Cheng Yeh (Chairman) Ming-Hsiung Liu (CEO) |
| Products | Air cooling Cases Peripherals Graphics cards Motherboards Laptops & Notebooks Power supplies Server hardware |
| Brands | Aorus |
| Revenue |  US$ 1.94 billion (2018) |
Operating income | US$ 60.4 million (2013) |
Net income | US$ 78.9 million (2013) |
Number of employees | 7,100 (2012) |
| Website | www.gigabyte.com |
GIGABYTE (actually "Gigabyte Technology", Chinese: 技嘉科技; pinyin: Jìjiā Kējì), is a Taiwanese manufacturer and distributor of computer hardware. They have a fairly large share of the motherboard retail market.
Products[edit]
GIGABYTE is most known for their motherboards. Their older "Ultra Durable" motherboards were very high quality and actually very durable. More than a decade old "Ultra Durable" AM3 motherboards keep on working. They lost their way and replaced "Ultra Durable" with "more RGB" around 2017-2018.
Gigabyte either makes or re-brands a lot of other computer hardware such as graphics cards, computer cases, laptops, mice and keyboards and power supplies. They make motherboards and graphics cards themselves. Much of the other hardware (cases, power supplies, keyboards) are simply re-branded products made by other companies on their behalf.
Linux Support[edit]
Gigabyte motherboards and graphics cards are generally decently supported by Linux even though Gigabyte Technologies do not care about Linux at all, not even a little. They do not submit patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List and they are generally not there when it comes to direct Linux support.
The only reason their hardware works with Linux at all is that it is generally supported by other parts of the computer ecosystem. As an example, their AMD based graphics cards will work just fine because AMD ensures that their chipsets work fine on GNU/Linux.
Motherboards[edit]
Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P "Ultra Durable" motherboard
The it8686 and it8792 chips on most of their AM4 motherboards are not supported by the Linux kernel. You will need to build a out-of-tree it87 module (now EOL) manually or using Dynamic Kernel Module Support to get motherboard temperature readings & fan control.
Gigabyte motherboard are, apart from that, generally fine and very suitable for Linux use. The Ethernet controllers built into Gigabyte motherboards are either common Realtek, Intel or Qualcomm chipsets that are all supported by modern kernels. The rest of the hardware is typically made by either AMD or Intel and ASMedia and all of it is usually supported by the kernel.
The RGB lights on most Gigabyte motheboards with RGB lights can be controlled by the OpenRGB software if you apply a kernel patch provided by that project and boot with the acpi_enforce_resources=lax kernel parameter.
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