Recently, Gigabyte made some quiet announcements about its application of solid state capacitors paired with improved ferrite core choke coils, Low RDS MOSFET's and comprehensive passive cooling thermal solutions (aka, damn big heatsinks everywhere). The combination of all these parts, according to Gigabyte, helps reduce temperatures, improve power efficiency to the CPU and improve PC stability under load. The collection of features has been suitably marketed as "Gigabyte Ultra Durable 2" on the GA-P35DQ6 motherboard.

You may or may not recall the problem of burst capacitors that turned into an industry wide epidemic a few years ago. What caused poor quality electrolytic capacitors to burst after ~3 years is a story of industrial espionage, stolen chemical recipe's, and cut rate electronic components. Motherboard makers learned a hard lesson, and consequently the use of higher quality Japanese-made electrolytic capacitors, and conductive polymer solid-state aluminum capacitors has been stressed on virtually every flagship motherboard to be released since.

Solid state capacitors improve overall stability, and last significantly longer than the electrolytic variety. When the burst capacitor problem really hit, many computers suffered intermittent errors and crashes. Only opening up the PC case to inspect the motherboard revealed that the little aluminum capacitor cans had split, popped, and leaked gooey brown electrolyte all over the place. Motherboards from almost every vendor suffered to one degree or another, leaving users like you and me stuck with out of warranty boards that no one wanted back, that no longer worked.

While a background in electronics is necessary to really understand how the interaction of the three electrical components results in a better product, the basic gist of the technology is worth knowing. The average desktop motherboard lifecycle lasts from 6 months to 3 years, and we think it should operate reliably for at least that span of time.