One downside of Apple's many hand held devices is that they draw a lot of power when charging and the latest iPad is even more power hungry, especially when the battery is running low. As such it's getting to the stage where most computers will no longer be able to charge Apple's portable devices, although for DIY:ers it's less of an issue as many motherboards can deliver more power to the USB ports and in in the case of Gigabyte's new Z77 boards, the new iPad is no match.
As you can see in the video below, the iPad in question only had seven percent battery life remaining and at this point it's sucking 1.98A. That's a lot of power and we were told by Gigabyte that they've seen it hitting just over 2A. That said, as you might've noticed from the picture above, this quickly drops once the iPad begins to charge, but considering a standard USB 2.0 port only delivers 500mA and even a USB 3.0 port will only deliver 900mA, you have to wonder how much Apple cares about PC owners.In all fairness, Gigabyte isn't the only company to deliver extra power to mobile devices that sucks extra juice to reduce their charging time, but many laptops and brand name desktops doesn't offer this ability and if they do, they won't be able to do it at close to 2A. The power draw is dynamic as you can hear mentioned in the video, but even so, charging new Apple devices from a standard USB port might soon be a memory of the past.
In this specific case we used the On/Off Charge port on the Gigabyte motherboard, as the port auto detect Apple devices and will deliver as much power as the device requests. For a laugh, once we'd shot this little video, we also tested with a few smartphones, but none of them drew in excess of 600-700mA.

Read more: Apple's new iPad draws 2A, charges from Gigabyte Z77 motherboard by VR-Zone.com