Not everyone has the same budget when they are building a PC. While some enthusiasts might have be willing to spend a lot to ensure that they have the best that money can buy, others are on more modest budgets that require some restraint when purchasing parts.

GIGABYTE understands and has a number of motherboards geared towards users on a budget. Recently TweakTown's Steven Bassiri has a chance to review one of these boards, the GIGABYTE Z170XP-SLI, and gave it top marks. 

For those that don't know, the Z170XP-SLI is a value-oriented board that has support for NVIDIA's SLI as well as AMD's CrossFireX technology. This means that the board will support more than one NVIDIA or AMD card, which is great for users that want the power that two video cards can provide.

Steven says he liked the SLI support on the board, solid memory support at 3600 MHz, upgraded audio, and Intel NIC on the board.

Here are his final thoughts on the board:

The Z170XP-SLI has a lot of the latest features I come to expect from a Z170 motherboard above the $150 price range; USB 3.1, upgraded audio, Intel NIC, solid performance, and decent overclocking capabilities. That being said, this motherboard only costs $136 on Amazon making it a very good deal for those on a budget.The Z170XP-SLI can perform like more expensive motherboards and even overclock like them in the right conditions, but producing those conditions might be difficult, and that is why people pay more for better overclocking.

You can find out more on the GIGABYTE Z170XP-SLI here.  

We are always excited when overclockers break records, especially when it's on our hardware. Our friend 8Pack recently crushed a number of World Records and Global First Place with 3D Mark Fire Strike and 3D Mark Vantage on a GIGABYTE X99 Champion motherboard.

Let's take a look at at the records 8Pack crushed.

First up is his Fire Strike score of 44583, which is a World Record. Aside from his GIGABYTE motherboard, he hit this score using 4x NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti cards and a Intel Core i7-5960X CPU clocked at 5,860 MHz.

On FireStrike Extreme, 8Pack was able to attain equally impressive results. Check it out below:

Next up lets take a look at his Vantage score. This was done on the same hardware, and as you can see the result was nothing short of stellar.

Moving down to the 3x FireStrike Vantage category, you can see that 8Pack maintains his lead. For this entry his CPU is clocked slightly higher at 5,865 MHz.

Finally, in the 2x GPU category 8Pack was able to break two Global First Place records.

First on FireStrike he was able to hit 36498:

And on Vantage he was able to bring in another Global First Place score of P111069:

8Pack's phenomenal scores is just another example of why GIGABYTE motherboards lead the industry in overclocking.

The Z170X-SOC Force is GIGABYTE's overclocker-focused board for the Intel 100 series chipset.

While you can overclock on any of our boards, the SOC Force is specially tuned for overclocking and provides features like the OC Touch panel on the front which make adjustments easy for those that have the motherboard out on a test bench.

Recently Steven Bassiri from TweakTown reviewed the Z170X-SOC Force and gave it a rating of 93%. Steven said that he liked the 4-Way SLI and three M.2 32Gb/s Slots, the High-Quality VRM, and excellent overclocking features available on the board.

Here's a summarized version of his final thoughts on the board:

The Z170X-SOC Force is built to be the largest, and most equipped overclocking motherboard GIGABYTE has to offer for Skylake, and it lives up to its legacy. The Z170X-SOC Force is the result of a long line of predecessors that filled in the same price range and feature set, and while there aren't many people who might make use of all its features, many people still look at it as their dream motherboard. The aesthetics of the Z170X-SOC Force are possibly the best of any OC series motherboard from GIGABYTE thus far.The Z170X-SOC Force is aimed at two different segments of the enthusiast population; those who want crazy amounts of GPUs and M.2 storage, and those who want strong overclocking features and performance. The Z170X-SOC Force is currently one of the better options if you are going to go for Z170 multi-GPU world records on HWBot, or if you want to build a super equipped gaming rig with the latest in storage technology.

The GIGABYTE 100 Series motherboards have a number of exciting features, but one of the most interesting has to be the Killer Network Controller from Rivet Networks.

Now normally network controllers aren't a huge source of innovation. People simply don't think of them as they do the CPU, GPU, or memory connectivity like M.2 or PCI-E. But the Killer NIC, found in select GIGABYTE Z170 boards, isn't an ordinary network controller. Its proprietary software can classify and prioritize traffic ensuring that latency sensitive applications, such as multiplayer games, will not be impacted while other things like downloads run in the background.

Recently Mark Nelson from The Tech Report visited Rivet Networks' headquarters for a briefing and posted a great writeup on the Killer NICs, explaining how the controllers work and putting them through their paces on various benchmarks.

Here's a brief rundown of the advantages it brings gamers:

Killer tells us its driver has been tweaked to minimize latency, so as soon as it gets any amount of data to send, it puts that data straight onto the wire. In contrast, a driver that doesn't prioritize latency may hold off on sending to do a couple of things. Such a driver might wait to combine multiple small payloads into a single packet if the destination is the same, or it may queue up multiple sends at a time to minimize the number of interrupts taken. Games usually send out data in 128-byte chunks or less, so Killer's driver should minimize the amount of time that game data spends in the network stack. In fact, the Killer Networking folks claim the E2400's latency performance beats the competition by up to 50% during single-application usage.

Here's what Mark found out during his benchmarking. As you can see, the Killer NIC beats the competition by a healthy margin. Check it out:

 If you want to learn more, check out the full article here on The Tech Report.

As you might remember, we recently announced the Grand Prize Winners of the GIGABYTE Heroes of the Storm™ Sweepstakes as well as the 2nd Round of Winners for GIGABYTE Prizes. There are some great prizes on the list, which include GIGABYTE motherboards and a trip to Blizzcon in California!

We sent out an email to winners recently, but sometimes these get stuck in spam filters and won't make it to your inbox. You can check the full list of winners here.

If you won the Grand Prize of a free trip to Blizzcon we'll need to hear back from you ASAP! Don't lose your chance to go to Blizzcon!

Hey guys,

I have for you the GIGABYTE Tweak Launcher (GTL) software to use on the Z170 chipset GIGABYTE motherboards to help you overclock in Windows. We’ve tested it on all versions of Windows OSes and it operates well. You can change various frequencies including base clock, CPU and Uncore ratios, various volts and voltage related parameters.

Happy OCing and be careful with this software, don’t go setting crazy voltage because you can kill hardware (for example, the settings in the screenshot were done using liquid nitrogen so we could use high voltage such as 1.45vcore on CPU and 1.84v on memory). On air cooling, these settings are not advisable. I would stick to 10% overvolt at most for regular OC rigs.

Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f4loxilzn1prbhg/gtl%202.2%20b15.0923.1.rar?dl=0

Over at eTeknix, Ryan Leiserowitz posted a review of our GIGABYTE GA-X99-SOC Chamption motherboard. Ryan is a hardcore overclocker, and this was his chance to put the board through its paces.

Ryan mentions in his review that the board has enough features for pro-overclockers, and is priced competitively enough that amateur overclockers don't have to think twice about including one in their next system build.

“From pro-overclockers to enthusiast system builders, if you’re wanting to push your hardware to the limit, the GX-X99-SOC is the perfect tool for the job,”  Ryan writes. 

In the end eTeknix gave the board their "Overclockers Dream" award. Thanks guys!

GIGABYTE continues to lead the way with world records and global first places.

Over at 3D Mark, you can find the latest benchmark scores posted for FireStrike Extreme. The top score belongs to "Mad" and as you can see, he hit 34665 using a GIGABYTE X-99 SOC Champion-CF motherboard. Check it out below:

Aside from being a world record this score is remarkable for two reasons. It's the first time that the 34,000 barrier has been broken with a quad-VGA card setup, and it's also a full 1,000 points above the competition. 

Next up is a Global First Place for Fire Strike Extreme with just one GPU. 

As you can see, the 14,000 barrier has been broken. A first for a single card setup. 

And finally the regular Fire Strike with one GPU:

For those curious, here's a peak at what the rig used looks like: