Gigabyte is planning to release motherboards and graphics cards under its independent gaming brand Aorus. Existing Aorus-branded products include gaming notebooks, mice, keyboards and peripherals.

Also Gigabyte is looking to answer gaming brands to compete against the ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) and Micro-Star International's (MSI) Gaming series. Gigabyte will begin selling Aorus branded motherboards in early January 2017, starting with Intel's new 200-series chipsets, while graphics cards will need to wait until AMD and Nvidia release new high-end GPUs.

You should be seeing the first Aorus branded motherboards based on Intel's upcoming 200-series chipset and 7th generation Core "Kaby Lake" processor support in January 2017. Graphics cards wise first up would possible be AMD VEGA and perhaps IF released, a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Meanwhile, Asustek is mainly pushing its ROG brand for top-end gaming products and ROG Strix for high-end products. In addition to motherboards, graphics cards and notebooks, Asustek also sells desktops, monitors, keyboards, mice, earphones, and microphones under the ROG brand.

 
AORUS Thunder K7 Mechanical Keyboard

MSI's Gaming series notebooks will achieve strong sales in 2016 and the company is expected to ship over 1.2 million gaming notebooks, accounting for around 25% of worldwide gaming notebook shipments of 4.5 million units. MSI's graphics card shipments are also expected to reach five million units thanks to its Gaming series brand's strong market recognition reports digitimes.

Gigabyte to use Aorus branding on motherboards and graphics cards