A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.
This week-end is your last chance to participate in our Halloween photo contest! Put on your costume, collect your candies, go party, but mainly don’t forget to share your costume with us for a chance to win some cool hardware!
We only ask that your picture must feature one of the following item:
A GIGABYTE motherboard or motherboard color box.
Your open system with an easily identifiable GIGABYTE motherboard.
The following wording: I LOVE GIGABYTE MOTHERBOARDS!(Either written on a piece of paper, photoshoped in the picture, painted on your forehead, tattooed across your back… be creative!)
The end of the year is approaching and it’s time for our annual survey. The GIGABYTE team built up a quick questionnaire so that we can learn from your preferences and help us design even better motherboards with what you want!
So help us out and in return, we give you the opportunity to win a motherboard!! That’s right, fill in a few questions for an easy chance to win a GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 or a Z97X-SOC Force!!
Imagine you had a helicopter and could navigate a 60-foot trimaran (i.e. giant sailboat) using nothing other than your smartphone from that helicopter. Sounds pretty crazy, but that is exactly what Vodafone NZ and Samsung guys are up to in New Zealand.
Vodafone’s got a promotion at the moment, where one lucky guy or girl will get to fly in a helicopter and remote-control a 60-foot sailboat using their phone. Not only that, but they will race Jimmy Spithill, the famous America’s Cup winner and a champion Aussie yachtsman.
Here is the best part: It turns out, the automation/remote control process is run by the GIGABYTE Brix Pro Core i7 PC! Coooool!
GIGABYTE is quite proud of its innovation and to see one of our new technologies powering such an awesome project gives everyone at our company a special satisfaction.
Playtech, Vodafone’s Brix PC supplier, has added that “Playtech is happy to supply the GIGABYTE Brix GB-BXi7-4770R to be used in the Vodafone Sailing project. It meets the requirements that are set out by the project team that only demands the best performance from the latest Intel Core i7 CPU yet are compact enough to be fitted inside a very small space. The GIGABYTE BRIX quality is top in the industry to make sure the BRIX will operate flawlessly under the rough condition that it gets put through in the race.”
GLOBAL BRIX GIVEAWAY: This story has such an unusual project for our Brix PC that it got us thinking to give away a GIGABYTE BXBR-1900 Brix PC running a 2GHz(2.41GHz turbo burst) quad core Celeron. Our good friends at Corsair have donated a 4GB DDR3L memory module and a super fast Force LX 128GB SSD drive as a perfect complement for Brix to complete the hardware (all you need to do is acquire and install the operating system). To participate in the giveaway, please visit the official GIGABYTE Facebook page, find the story about Brix PC powering Vodafone promo and post your dream Brix project in the comments. We will announce the winner on Facebook and blog.
Check out the YouTube video put out by Vodafone NZ.
Now to figure out how to win the main prize so I can fly in the helicopter and crash land this trimaran (juuuuuuuuuuuust kidding!).
Comin’ in hot, too hooooot!
Thanks to Vodafone and Playtech for letting us share this cool news with our followers and thanks to Corsair for supplying the memory and SSD to complete the Brix PC hardware for the global giveaway!
Featured today on Lifehacker.com is the latest up-date coming from our good friend TonymackX86. (click the image, or here).
Made for Hakintosh machines (non-Apple hardware that has been made—or "hacked"—to run Mac OS X), Tonymac put together a very easy to follow and comprehensive step by step guide to install Mac OS X Yosemite. From how to choose your hardware to troubleshooting solutions, this guide covers it all and makes installing a Mac OS on X86 platform a breeze!
Because overclocking is not something that comes naturally to everyone, getting a little help is always appreciated. Steven Bassiri over at Tweak Town was nice enough to put together an OC guide of the new Intel Core i7 5960X Extreme Edition on X99 platform. The best bit about is that it was made on a GIGABYTE X99-SOC FORCE motherboard :)
So there you have it, a well explained way to adjust your BIOS settings in order to get more juice out of that CPU’s 8 cores!
Only a couple of weeks after the end of the GIGABYTE Z97 Pentium AE Challenge, GIGABYTE has the honor to launch a new overclocking competition with the GIGABYTE TARGET OC. This time around, instead of asking the OC community to break records and reach for the ultimate limits, we selected a few benchmarks with some specific scores that participants will have to try to match perfectly. Some precise system tweaking will be in order!
Overclocking is not only about pushing the limits of your hardware, it is also about mastering the skills needed to tweak all aspects of your system to achieve the performance that you want. In this challenge we will also give you an opportunity to showcase your overclocking and downclocking skills. With TARGET OC, GIGABYTE decided to have some fun with selection of the target scores and chose some epic world records back in the day as well as some super bad scores to see how well you can tune your system to the level of performance of old time greats and super bad overclocks of today. By trying to hit every scores set, we are hoping the participants will have fun trying to search the perfect setting for the perfect score.
Contest Stages
STAGE 1: XTU
Target score: 159 marks
We challenge you to match the worst Pentium G3258 XTU score on HWBOT (link)
Submission will be open for 2 hours open on Sunday, October 19th at 2pm (UTC+08:00)
STAGE 2: HWBOT PRIME
Target score: 2967.55 pps
We challenge you to match the worst Pentium G3258 HWBOT Prime score on HWBOT (link)
Submission will be open for 2 hours open on Sunday, October 26th at 2pm (UTC+08:00)
STAGE 3: 3DMARK05
Target score: 30257 marks
We challenge you to match an epic world record from 2007 set by a legendary US overclocker OPPAINTER (link)
Submission will be open for 2 hours open on Sunday, November 2nd at 2pm (UTC+08:00)
STAGE 4: SUPER PI 32M
Target score: 20min27sec570ms
We challenge you to match an epic world record from 2006 set by a legendary US overclocker bachus_anonym (link)
Submission will be open for 2 hours open on Sunday, November 9th at 2pm (UTC+08:00)
STAGE 5: CATZILLA 720P
Target score: 1938 marks
We challenge you to match a 2000th ranked score on HWBOT in Catzilla 720p (link)
Submission will be open for 2 hours open on Sunday, November 16th at 2pm (UTC+08:00)
A lot is on the line too! The winner of each stage will be rewarded a nice $400 USD. But that’s not all, in an effort to have everyone from different level of overclocking join, we’ve included 5 awesome lucky draw prizes, including two X99-SOC FORCE, a Z97N-Gaming 5, a Z97N-Gaming WIFI and a Z97X-SOC FORCE LN2!! All you have to do is submit your score in at least 4 out of the 5 stages and you will be automatically entered to win.
This challenge was divided into 5 stages and invited the overclocking community to push the limits of the recently launched Intel Pentium AE processor on any GIGABYTE Z97 series motherboard.
Here are the winners:
Stage
Benchmark
Winner
Prize
Stage 1
XTU
nvidiaforever2
USD $500 for 1st place
Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5
HWBOT Prime SuperPI 32M Memory Clock CPU Frequency
One thing that you need to look at very closely before buying a new motherboard for your next PC DIY project is the onboard available connectivity. Having the latest connectivity such as SATA Express, M.2 or event Thunderbolt™ support means that you will not be left behind in terms of fast transfer speed or upgrades with the latest technology.
Next Generation SATA Express Connector
GIGABYTE X99 series motherboards feature an onboard SATA Express connector which provides performance far superior to that of current SATA technologies. SATA Express features data transfer rates of up to 10Gb/s, considerably higher than SATA Revision 3 (6Gb/s), which won’t bottleneck faster NAND flash technologies in cutting edge SSDs. SATA Express combines the benefits of PCI-Express and SATA to provide much higher bandwidth, allowing SATA Express based drives to perform at similar speeds as PCI-Express based drives.
Dual M.2 Technology with Onboard WIFI and Bluetooth 4.0
GIGABYTE X99 motherboards with Dual M.2 technology provides users PCI-Express connectivity for SSD devices and onboard 11AC WIFI + Bluetooth 4.0. Delivering up to 10 Gb/s data transfer speeds, M.2 offers considerably faster storage performance than current mSATA and even SATA Revision 3 (6Gb/s) storage devices. GIGABYTE’s stacked design optimizes the PCB real-estate usage, allowing more components to be efficiently added without compromising any space.
Turbo M.2 Technology
GIGABYTES X99 SOC motherboards feature a Turbo M.2 socket to provide compact connectivity for SSD devices. Thanks to the unique design from the X99 chipset, 4 PCIe (Gen.2) lanes can be allocated to the M.2 socket, unlocking up to 20 Gb/s of bandwidth.
Thunderbolt™ Ready
GIGABYTE X99 brings the expandability needed to make your system the ultimate one with an onboard pin header to accommodate the addition of a GIGABYTE Thunderbolt™ add-in card. The Thunderbolt™ controller can provide bandwidth of up to 20 Gb/s, compared to a max of 10 Gb/s on previous generation designs. This allows for incredible data transfer speeds when using high performance storage devices, while also supporting daisy-chaining of up to 12 devices and triple digital display support.
Here is a quick presentation video on the available connectivity mentioned above for the GIGABYTE X99 series motherboards.
With every new line up of motherboards from GIGABYTE, an OC Guide is made to help the users push the stock limits of their systems. X99 series is no exception to this rule. Coming straight from the OC Lab, here is the GIGABYTE X99-OC Guide made by the famous Soffos1990.
Features
OC PCIe Switch:
Allows the user to disable individual PCI-E slots. This is especially useful for PCIe diagnostic when it is difficult to remove the PCIe cards with cooling apparatus installed on. Also, you will notice that there are 4 LED lights, one for each PCI-E slot. If the PCIe card installed in the slot is working without a problem, then the LEDs stays on.
OC Ignition:
Provides power to DIMMs slots, PCIe slots and peripheral devices even when the system is off. This feature is a GIGABYTE exclusive and provides many hidden benefits to users. First of all you can test not only the PSU to make sure it properly works, but also any voltage modifications on your graphics cards, water cooling systems, case mods and fans (Virtually anything that requires the board or PSU to provide power to can be engaged). It is especially useful during cold bug situations when you need a fan to run 24/7 to keep condensation at bay. It also can be used to provide continuous power to the PCIe/PCI based RAM cards that lose memory when they are powered off.
