Intel’s 10Gbps copper-based Thunderbolt technology is big at this year’s Computex show, and Gigabyte was not shy about showing off their Thunderbolt hardware. Not to be outdone by the Intel booth, Gigabyte had on display a Thunderbolt motherboard and no less than 13 pieces of Thunderbolt hardware!

The motherboard in question is Gigabyte’s GA-Z77X-UP5 TH which is an ATX form factor board that supports Intel Ivy Bridge processors, dual UEFI BIOS technology, SLI and CrossFireX multi-GPU setups, four DDR3 DIMM slots, six SATA 6Gbps ports, three PCI-E 3.0 x1 slots, three PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots, and a single legacy PCI slot. It also, of course, features a Thunderbolt port.

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The list of Thunderbolt-enabled peripherals was impressive – they only seemed to be missing Thunderbolt docks. The full list of devices is available in the table below, but Gigabyte had the Apple Thunderbolt display, several Thunderbolt external hard drives, a Thunderbolt SSD, Thunderbolt-equipped RAIDed NAS boxes from several vendors, and the active Thunderbolt cables themselves (from Sumitomo Electric).

Vendor Model name Category
Apple Thunderbolt Display Display
Blackmagic design UltraStudio 3D Video editing
Blackmagic design Intensity Extreme Video editing
CalDigit T1 Storage
elgato Thunderbold SSD Storage
LaCie 2Big Storage
LaCie eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Hub
Promise Technology, Inc Pegasus R6 Storage
Seagate GoFlex ThunderBolt Adapter HDD Adapter
Seagate GoFlex Desk ThunderBolt Adapter HDD Adapter
Sonnos Sonnet ECHO ExpressCard ExpressCard
Sumitomo Electric Thunderbolt Cable Cable
Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Drive Storage

Although Thunderbolt is going to be a niche connection (mostly due to expense of cables and components vs the “good enough” and much cheaper USB 3.0 standard) for the foreseeable future, Computex 2012 is trying its best to drive home the idea that Thunderbolt is not going away. There are definitely more Thunderbolt devices than I had originally predicted to show up at the show in Taipei.