A very public argument has broken out between two of the biggest motherboard manufacturers, Asus and Gigabyte. The Taiwanese companies fell out last week when Asus released a statement saying that “a certain Taiwanese Motherboard Manufacturer had made false claims against Asus motherboards.”
This, it turned out, was down to leaked confidential information from Gigabyte that Asus’ Energy Processing Unit (EPU) doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Asus has claimed that the motherboard chip “can detect current PC loadings in real time and automatically moderate the power supply for complete system level power savings.”
Late last week some slides, branded ‘confidential documents, not for distribution’ ended up on the web. In the slides, Gigabyte says the energy advances are purely software based and accuses Asus of ‘cheating end users.’
Gigabyte standing by its allegations
And, despite saying there was ‘regret’ over the incident – largely as a result of showing the documents in a press briefing - it seems Gigabyte isn’t in any mood to acquiesce over the allegations.
“While Gigabyte would like to express regret over any confusion this situation may have caused our competitor’s customers, we do stand by our statements and testing report 100 per cent, and eagerly await our competitor to clarify the issues we raised in order to avoid any further confusion.”
In other words, Gigabyte wants Asus to talk in more detail about the specifics of what it said, in terms of the EPU’s performance. Gigabyte says its statements were made in response to a report Gigabyte compiled comparing its GA-EP35-DS3L motherboard against Asus’ P5K-SE/EPU.
However, things aren't as simple as just bickering over the EPU - Asus and its smaller competitor Gigabyte have bickered for some time over various issues and it could well be that things have come to a head. Gigabyte has admitted the slides came from its own event, so if Asus can prove its competitor wrong in court, it could be interesting.
Asus’s statement late last week claimed it was ready to take legal action against the company adding: “After investigation, it is clear that this company in question made use of a sponsored gathering of local and international media to deliberately spread information that we consider both untrue and without credible verification.”
“This ‘disinformation’ is not only extremely damaging to ASUS but also completely misleading to the consumers. “
We’ll see what happens next…
