GIGABYTE 4K Collage Driver Available Now!

If you own a GIGABYTE Thunderbolt motherboard you’ll be able to enjoy a free upgrade to the new Intel 4K Collage graphics driver and play 4K content on four standard 1080P monitors. 4K monitors are still rather expensive, so this may be a fun way to fiddle around with your system config and enjoy 4K content while you wait for the monitor prices to come down. Of course this new 4K Collage feature will also appeal to digital signage and industrial PC system builders. GIGABYTE’s Thunderbolt motherboards are the Z77X-UP5 TH, Z77X-UP4 TH and the Z77MX-D3H TH.
The screenshot below shows the new driver in the downloads section of each product page on the GIGABYTE website.

GIGABYTE, in cooperation with our friends at Aduzai, prepared a 4K video that can be used free of charge by anyone wanting to test their 4K setup or even promote their 4K products. This video is called The Beauty of Taiwan - 我愛臺灣 and is the property of GIGABYTE and Aduzai and can be used by anyone for free, the only restriction being that you may not sell it or charge for it’s use in any way.
The 4K video can be downloaded from these links:
1. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2ugi45eojnzbgo1/JUtlXvR3gs
2. https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share?s=4qSVDfHlR54j8PdBsc6jNQ
For more information please visit our 4K Collage microsite.

Christian Ney on the quest to complete memory world record domination

Swiss overclocker supremo, Christian Ney, has one last hurdle to jump to complete his memory frequency word record domination on all platforms. His most signifacant memory frequency record is the global world record frequency he currently holds with GIGABYTE A75 board at 1950MHz (x2). GIGABYTE tends to be the board of choice for extreme overclockers looking to take the ultimate memory frequency record so it’s no surprise Christian is currently searching the “internets” looking for any DDR2 flavour of GIGABYTE P45 chipset. Current DDR2 record is held by an Iranian overclocker at 900MHz with GIGABYTE EP45-UD3R.

I’ve spotted that Christian is about to get some help from a Belgian overclocker and his EP45-UD3P which should be the perfect board for this sort of OC adventure.

Kingpin Cooling has even named a memory cooler after Christian, it looks pretty sweet too, check it out here.

Good luck there!

Cookie breaks Piledriver WPRIME 32M record on GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3

HiCookie is back amongst the record breakers on HWBOT.org earning a first place spot benching WPRIME 32M on an AMDFX-8350 eight core processor. Cookie did it by pushing an AMD FX-8350 processor to 7.39GHz using a revised and updated GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3 motherboard which supports GIGABYTE Dual UEFI BIOS. Check Cookie’s submission screenshot below.

Check out the score submission at HWBOT.org here.

Find out more about the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD3 motherboard here.

GIGABYTE X79-UP4: Voted best motherboard of 2012 by Vortez readers

UK techies Vortez.net recently held a ‘Best of 2012’ poll where all their loyal readership were asked to vote for the best product of the year in each PC component category. We’re delighted to see that our GIGABYTE X79-UP4 motherboard beat off some stiff competition to claim the ‘Best of’ award in the motherboard category. Pretty sweet.

Check it out here on Vortex.net

Details about the GIGABYTE X79-UP4 can be found here.

GIGABYTE Winter OC Whiteout Winner Announced: Xtreme Addict Takes All!

The conclusion of our Winter OC Whiteout contest was reached a few days ago, and officially announced today with Xtreme addict making his presence felt with a thoroughly dominant performance that saw him claim all three stages! Congrats! Xtreme Addict takes home three GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H motherboards with respective Seidon 120M liquid cooling kits from Cooler Master.

A bonus prize was also claimed by Perica_barii, for his submission photo application. The bonus prize winner gets a GIGABYTE Z77X-HD4 plus a Cooler Master Sirus S-5.1 gaming headset. The bonus prize winner was determined by the number of Facebook likes on the GIGABYTE Motherboard Tech Column Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/GIGABYTEmotherboards

A big thanks to all who competed, and especially to those of you who added a festive touches to your submission photos. Also a big thanks to Cooler Master for contributing some cool prizes. You can find the contest scores and standings here at the HWBOT competition page.

CustoMac Update: Buyer's Guide January 2013

CustoMac guru tonymacx86 recently published his latest buyers guide, which according to Tony, he will be updating on a monthly basis. We’re happy to see the January guide has plenty of GIGABYTE motherboards being recommended across several CustoMac builds including budget, mini and deluxe builds.

It’s great to see GIGABYTE connected with any tech project that really embraces the spirit of DIY computing. At the end of the day, building your own custom Mac involves a very similar approach to building any other kind of DIY PC. Speccing out the components of your build with acute attention to detail is something we all take pleasure in.

But hey. Thanks to guys like tonymacx86, there’s a heck of a lot of guidance and advice available out on the interweb for people who building with a specific usage scenario in mind.

Check out the CustoMac January buyers guide here tonymacx86.com

4K Collage display using DVI – tried & tested

Today I’d like to follow up on our recent 4K collage announcement where we hooked up a GIGABYTE dual Thunderbolt motherboard to a DP to dual DP splitter outputting a 4K video signal across four standard HD displays. The remarkable thing is that his was all done using on the HD4000 processor graphics of our Ivy Bridge processor – no discrete card!

See the original config below:

We just tested a DVI-D splitter dongle from Sapphire that allows you to do a similar thing with HD displays that use DVI. This is useful for two reasons; firstly that you don’t need to use newer HD displays that support DisplayPort input. DVI-D works just as well. Secondly being a digital signal we can then also support conversion from DVI to HDMI, which means it’ll also work fine with four HDMI equipped displays. So if you have the adapters you can do 4K collage using DP, HDI or DVI-D

 

Finally, the adapter from Sapphire will also let you power any 4K displays that support a 4x DVI inputs for a single 4K stream – a configuration that is popular on many earlier 4K displays. Here’s an example.

You can find more info about the Sapphire adapter here.

Learn more about our 4K display and Collage technologies here.

CPUID launches GIGABYTE OC version of CPU-Z

A few days ago CPUID launched a new GIGABYTE OC branded version of their very popular CPUz application. It’s something we especially hope overclokers will appreciate – bringing our signature OC orange and black looks to probably the one app that all overclockers use on a daily basis.

Check out this screenshot.  How could any GIGABYTE lovin’ CPU pusher possibly resist?

You can download the new 1.62.2 OC version at CPUID.com here.

Win GIGABYTE motherboards and cash at the Multi-Threaded Mayhem 2013 Comp on Overclock.net

Throughout the month on January 2013 Overclock.net are running an overclocking competition where aspiring ‘clockers can win $500 cash plus the chance to win a GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 and a Z77X-UD3H board.

Entitled the Multi-Threaded Mayhem 2013 (or MTMII), the idea is to compete on three heavily threaded benchmarks, wPrime 32M, wPrime 1024M and 3Dmark Vantage CPU score (physx disabled), on 6 classes based around cores and threads (AMD 4,6 and 8 threads, plus Intel 4, 8 and 12 threads).

 

The contest is open to all OCN members, and ends on January 31^st. Right now as we hit the half way stage, it’s encouraging to see plenty of submissions. The cash prize will be distributed across classes according to participation (e.g. if Intel the 8 threads class has 42% of the participation, that class will receive 42% of the prize pool). The winners of two GIGABYTE boards however, will be randomly chosen at the end of the competition in a prize draw of all participants. So even if you ain’t top dog, you’re still in with a shout.

Check out this thread on Overclock.net for rules, standings and more info.

GIGABYTE@CES 2013: Video Round Up

The dust has now settled on a very busy and productive CES 2013. But while the booths have been pulled down and the media, clients and vendors have returned from whence they came, there’s still plenty of video content flying about the web. Here’s a selection of some of the videos that have popped up on youtube in the last week or so:

Our old pal Andy Ruffel from eTeknix was out and about on the strip all week (…in fact I hear he still is..aha) but nevertheless still managed to take time to check out our suites where he caught our 4K Collage demo among other things. Check out these two vids from Andy.

 

Paul Lilly from Maximum PC also dropped by and shot two hands-on videos.

 

And finally, Linus of TechTips fame did a tour of the room in his usual effervescent vblog style.

How to setup a 4K Collage display rig on GIGABYTE dual thunderbolt motherboard

Earlier this week we announced support for 4k UltraHD displays using Intel Collage technology and our dual thunderbolt motherboards. Although the setup process is actually reasonably straight forward, I thought today I’d give you quicky guide as to how it all works. Let’s kick off with a list of the things you will need
 

Stuff You Will Need

Motherboard – A PC built using any GIGABYTE 7 series dual Thunderbolt motherboard.

Processor – Any 3^rd generation Intel® Core™ i5 or Core™ i7 processor supporting Intel®HD4000 processor graphics.

HD Displays - Four displays supporting 1920 x 1200 or 1900 x 1080 native resolutions with DisplayPort interfaces. For Intel Collage vertical mode you may also require a stand to hold the four displays in position.

Intel Collage driver – This will be released later this month, downloadable from the motherboard product download page – as per a regular VGA driver update.

DisplayPort Splitter Dongles - Finally, you also need two DisplayPorts splitter dongles plus DisplayPort cables that allows you connect four displays using the onboard Mini DisplayPorts of your GIGABYTE motherboard.

Here’s the splitter adapter from Lenovo that we used. 

Overclock.net meet in Sussex for a Christmas LN2 session: In photos

UK-based Overclock.net members got together over the festive season to squeeze in some LN2 fuelled fun. Here are some photos of the event, replete with captions for those of you who like to put names to faces… or perhaps I should say names to overclocking rigs.

Setting up Livestream and Board

 

Scooter doing some 2d on the UP7

Hiviz left, Blindfitter right

Gappo Insulating UD3

Dualists super heavy homemade CPU pot on 3770k + up7 & OCN chubby GPU pot on a 7970

Overclock.net is also currently running a MultiThread Mayhem II contest where as well earning some pocket money, challengers will also have the chance to win great GIGABYTE motherboard prizes.

Check it out at Overclock.net here.

Video: PC Perspective talk to GIGABYTE at CES 2013

PC Perspective’s Ryan Shrout was at our suite in Las Vegas yesterday, talking Colin Brix about our support for 4K displays using Intel’s Collage technology and our forthcoming Thin Mini-ITX offerings that are designed for all-in-one and embedded PC designs.

You can learn more about our 4K UltraHD support here.

GIGABYTE to debut 4K Collage Technology at CES 2013

A few months ago GIGABYTE announced its support for the latest UltraHD 4K resolution displays on our Dual Thunderbolt motherboards. The reason we were able to do this ahead of the competition was quite simple; in pure hardware terms Thunderbolt ports are basically Mini DisplayPorts (at least as far as display connectivity is concerned), and by having two of them, each capable of a 2K video stream, you’re right in the zone for full UltraHD or 4K display support.

Of course the really cool thing about our 4K support is that you’re able to power a 4K display directly from the Processor Graphics of your Intel Core i5 or i7 processor (or any that supports the Intel HD4000 graphics engine). You do not need a high-end GPU or discrete card installed. Your Ivy Bridge chip handles 4K video just fine.

However, one issue that has been abundantly apparent (until this week at least), is that 4K displays and TVs have been somewhat thin on the ground, and when they are available, they tend to be the most expensive piece of kit on the showroom floor. While this week’s CES show is predicted to see dozens of new 4K capable displays and TVs announced and showcased, the truth is that 4K device prices will inevitably remain pretty high for the foreseeable future. This is where Intel’s new Collage technology comes in.

Intel Collage Display Technology is a pretty neat way of setting up a full 4K display using only standard HD displays. The idea is that the video data stream that is split across the two DisplayPorts is then split once again using an adapter to power four displays. With your displays setup in vertical mode (i.e. two displays high, two displays wide) your Windows desktop is spread right across all four displays. See the diagram below.

In fact you can also arrange the displays in a more traditional horizontal mode so that your desktop is spread across four displays with an incredible pixel width of 7680 pixels at the standard 1200/1080 height – we’re talking about a massive workspace.

Curious to see this in action? No problem. Check out the video below featuring yours truly.

 

You can find more information plus a setup and device compatibility page on our website here.

Official press release link here:

4k/Collage Facebookphoto set here.

Win GIGABYTE gaming hardware at the Tom’s Hardware Sweepstakes

The festive season may be over for most of us, but over on Tom’s Hardware there’s still plenty of festive spirit going on with a sweepstake where we’ve teamed up to give away some very nice gaming hardware. Prizes include a  Aivia Osmium Mechanical Keyboard, Aivia Krypton Dual-chassis Gaming Mouse, a Two-sided KRYPTON MAT Gaming mouse pad and best of all a GIGABYTE G1.Sniper M3 motherboard.

Details about how to enter can be found here. Good luck!

GIGABYTE G1.Sniper M3 product page.

Video: Sin0822 walks us through the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H motherboard

Check this out. Enthusiast and power user Sin0822 takes us on a tour of our recently launched GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H motherboard, a well balanced board that sits neatly between our UD3H and UH5H models launched last year. As you’d expect, Sin0822 goes once again into pretty impressive depth, mentioning and comparing each and every IC on the board. Very interesting.

Check out detailed specs of the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H here.

Check out this cool PC mod in a Harley Davidson skeleton!

We noticed WestCoastMods put up a really unusual looking PC mod on their facebook page. I really like the theme on this one based around a bike frame. GIGABYTE matte black PCB motherboard fits in pretty good into the overall colour scheme as well.

Nicely done fellas! Looks legit