Soft Technology

The GIGABYTE Z97 Last Hurrah Challenge wrapped up over the weekend, and you can view the leaderboard over on HWBOT . As with any GIGABYTE overclocking challenge, the results were more than impressive and we wish to congratulate both the winners and everyone who entered. The official results are still being tabulated, and HWBOT will release the official results and overall winners soon. But for now we can share who got first place in the Extreme Challenge and Ambient Challenge. For the Extreme Challenge, team PURE's Xtreme Addic t took first place with 79 points. He was followed closely by Jagat Review's Lucky_noob who scored 63 points. Over at the Ambient Challenge, arhaam from Indonesia's team OC-44 took first place with 73 points while Coldest from Jagat Review's team took second place with 63 points. Congrats again to all the winners, and for more information on the contest head on over to HWBOT .

Overclocking TV (OCTV) conducted a series of one-on-one interviews with some of the world’s best known overclockers during the recent Computex 2015 overclocker gathering. This week they’re focusing on dinos22 who is one of GIGABYTE’s OC gurus. Check it out!

I worked with the fine faculty of Dimmitt ISD last week and they were very interested in how to use Google Hangouts to bring guest speakers into their classrooms. I promised them a video, which come to think of it, you might want too. Hope it helps!

GIGABYTE is pleased to receive two more awards for its 100-series motherboards. First up, our friends at HiTech Legion  recently gave the GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 7  a GOLD award. They give the motherboard the highest of praises: Gigabyte designed the Z170X Gaming 7 motherboard well it is stable, it performs as expected for a high end gaming board it doesn’t skimp on connectivity and is remarkably one of the sexiest motherboards they have ever produced. Now over at ThinkComputers  our Z170X Gaming G1 motherboard was bestowed with a very high score. During the review the author pointed out some of the industry leading features that allows GIGABYTE motherboards to stand apart from the competition: As I said in the introduction of this review the Z170X-Gaming G1 has been on my radar since it was revealed at Computex. Now that I’ve got my hands on it and have been able to test it am I still excited about it? You bet I am! Gigabyte has really put together an amazing flagship board for their

Ever since Apple announced it was joining the world of x86, people have been building 'Hackintosh' computers. For those that don't know, a Hackintosh is a regular PC that's running Mac OS X. Of course Apple doesn't officially support such efforts which is why communities have sprung up to help fill this gap. After all, without Apple's official support the process isn't quite a walk in the walk in the park that you'd expect. Our favorite community to support such efforts in making what they call "CustoMacs" is TonyMacx86 . Recently they published a guide on how to run MacOSX Yosemite on a GIGABYTE BRIX-s. You can check the guide out there  but be warned: it's not exactly for beginners but anyone that's comfortable tweaking some settings in their BIOS should be able to pull it off. So, are you reading to build a BRIXintosh?

It always feels good to be recognized for good work. As you know, we recently released our 100-series motherboards based on the Intel® 6 th  generation CPU and the Z170 chipset. Our board for gamers that demand the best, the Gaming G1, was recently reviewed by TweakTown where it received an Editor's Choice award and a score of 95%. Here's what Steven Bassiri from TweakTown said about the board :   Apart from having one of the highest capacity VRMs for the Intel Z170 chipset, the Z170X-Gaming G1 has to be one of the most feature packed motherboards. While this is kind of expected since the Z170 chipset is the most feature packed, GIGABYTE went above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to adding features. They not only added 4-way SLI/CrossFireX support, but also the latest Intel USB 3.1/Thunderbolt 3.0 controller and two extra SATA controllers. The board also comes with 13 possible USB 3.0 ports and two 32Gb/s M.2 slots. GIGABYTE even paid attention to the Wi-Fi/BT antenna

Here is a GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming G1 custom build we've been working on for our Intel Roadshow. Share it with your friends if you like it! SYSTEM SPEC: GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming G1 Intel 6700K @4.5GHz GIGABYTE 290X GPU Corsair H110i watercooling Corsair 16GB Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz Corsair AX760 PSU Corsair 512GB Force SSD Inwin 805 case Bitfenix LEDs Bitfenix LED Fans Bitfenix Cable Sleeving Windows 10 Pro   View Full Album

At GIGABYTE we hope you are as excited as we are about the launch of our 100 series motherboards, based on the Intel® Z170 chipset with support for Intel’s new 6th Gen. Core™ processor. One of the new features that our 100 series motherboards bring to the table is USB 3.1 over the USB Standard A connector and the new USB Type-C™ connector. You've probably heard quite a bit on the USB Type-C connector and know already about how it's making it easier to connect devices to it by being reversible and heard that it can be much more than a simple data transfer port. As GIGABYTE is always on the lookout to bring the latest innovations to its new boards, with the 100 series motherboards we are introducing the WORLD'S FIRST USB 3.1 solution powered by the new Intel USB3.1 controller, which provides much more bandwidth than others. As mentioned one of the main advantage from the Intel USB 3.1 controller is its capacity to utilize 4 PCIe Gen3 lanes, therefore offering a total of up t

The Z97 Last Hurrah Challenge is in full swing right now over at HWBOT, with around three weeks to go before they declare a winner. Right now Lucky_N00b is leading the pack, but it's still anyone's contest to win. GIGABYTE is pleased to announce that the mystery motherboards up for grabs are two of our Z170X-SOC Force which are designed with overclockers in mind. There's also up to $2,000 USD in cash prizes to be won. For more on the contest, and to check out the current leaderboards, head on over to HWBOT .

On some motherboards the network controller is a part often looked over. Most network controllers are good enough , and don't get the attention that other parts do. But here at GIGABYTE we took a different approach to the network interface controller with our 100 series boards, which is why we partnered with Rivet, makers of the Killer™ line of network controllers, to integrate its advanced traffic management solutions into our boards. The first layer of intelligent traffic management comes from the Advanced Stream Detect 2.0 function found in the Killer™ E2400 Network Interface Controller. Advanced Stream Detect 2.0 separates traffic into six levels based so that the user has a seamless, lag-free experience while each level gets the bandwidth it needs. For example, a multiplayer game may not need a lot of bandwidth but it's latency sensitive so its traffic needs to be prioritized. On the other hand, a Bit torrent download requires a lot of bandwidth but its packets can wait so