GIGABYTE’s 100 Series Motherboards Come With Intel's USB3.1 Controller

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 to 32 Gb/s of bandwidth. But of course specs are specs and actual performance may vary, so to demonstrate the increase of bandwidth we've put our working gloves on and put the two onboard fast ports to the test.

 

While having two USB3.1 devices connected and put under a full loading stress test, we were able a blazing 1725 Mb/read/write performance over the two USB3.1 ports! That is 2X the performance achieved than on other USB3.1 controller. 

For those doing storage intensive work such as media editing, this is a godsend. External storage drives are no longer bottlenecked by the motherboard’s connectivity. But increased bandwidth isn't the only benefit, USB 3.1 over both the Standard A and Type-C connector are also backward compatible with USB3.0 and 2.0 as well as support power delivery to charge up your mobile devices or external storage devices, making this Intel powered solution not only a blazing fast one but always one that is compatible with tens of thousands of devices out there!

Through the use of Intel’s USB 3.1 controller, GIGABYTE 100 series motherboards are able to rise above the competition and are the only choice for those that want to experience the full potential of USB 3.1.

For more info on GIGABYTE's 100 series motherboard: http://www.gigabyte.com/mb/100-gaming/Performance

Win Two Z170X-SOC Force Motherboards With GIGABYTE and HWBOT

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.

Here's Why GIGABYTE's 100 Series Motherboard is a KILLER

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 its packets are dropped in priority.

The next level of traffic management comes from the DoubleShot-X3™ app. This app works to improve your network connectivity by intelligently prioritizing traffic over the available connections. Wired connections tend to have less lag than wireless given the nature of the medium. As the graphic shows below, traffic levels that are sensitive to latency (such as games) will be routed via the two Killer E2400 Ethernet connections while traffic that's not latency sensitive will be routed via the Killer Wireless E1535 Adapter.

Why is this important?

Everyone is a multi tasker. While you play a multiplayer game such as World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto 5 you're probably running some other kind of download in the background. Without some kind of way to intelligently prioritize the traffic, the latency dependent multiplayer game has to compete with what's being downloaded. This means that your gameplay lag will spike, potentially making the game unplayable.

With the DoubleShot-X3 and Killer E2400, traffic is routed intelligently resulting in up to 10x improvements in latency when multitasking and 75% improvements in single application use. In addition, DoubleShot-X3 combines the speed of two wired Killer Gigabit Ethernet controllers with the flexibility of Killer Wireless to provide max throughput as high as 2.867Gbps.

This is just one of the exciting new features GIGABYTE's 100 series motherboards have. Be sure to check out some of the other posts on our blog to find out more on why GIGABYTE motherboards lead the industry.

The new E2400 NIC from Killer is featuring on the GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 and Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboards from the newly launched GIGABYTE 100 Series motherboards.