If you've shopped around for motherboards lately, you might've noticed Gigabyte's "Ultra Durable" branding. Essentially, the company uses that brand to advertise its motherboards' solid-state capacitors, low-resistance MOSFETs, and ferrite-core chokes. Together, those elements work to reduce heat dissipation and increase motherboard life span (sometimes dramatically so in overclocked systems). At least, that's Gigabyte's spiel.
Today, the motherboard maker has announced "Ultra Durable 3" branding, which covers all the aforementioned perks plus two-ounce copper PCBs. Gigabyte claims its peers use only one ounce (28.4 g) of copper for each of their boards' power and ground layers, while Ultra Durable 3 mobos feature two ounces per layer.
What does that mean? According to Gigabyte, the extra copper helps spread out heat from areas like the CPU's power circuitry, and that can cut temperatures by as much as 50°C. On top of that, the added copper can halve the circuit board's impedance and improve signal quality, which translates to reduced energy waste, higher system stability, and "greater margins for overclocking."
You'll find the Ultra Durable 3 logo on 12 of Gigabyte's P45 motherboards, which we won't list here for readability's sake. Just look for Gigabyte's EP45-series mobos with "UD3" at the end of the model name.
