GIGABYTE Offers Another Free Thunderbolt 3 Upgrade

[btarunr]

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards is proud to announce today, a new collection of GIGABYTE Motherboards that have been certified for Intel's Thunderbolt 3 technology. GIGABYTE is the leader in developing this technology as many devices in the market were created using GIGABYTE Motherboards as the golden sample.

Shortly after its release of the new Designare and ultra gaming motherboards GIGABYTE is announcing that many of these newly released boards have Thunderbolt 3 technology available to the users. Updating the BIOS and a simple software upgrade is all that is required of users to enable this feature. With a 40 Gb/s bandwidth, along with its ability to transmit data, video, audio, and power all in one cable, Thunderbolt technology is highly sought after for its rapid transfer speeds and ability to simplify cables around the computer. Users are able to daisy-chain up to six devices per port with an additional monitor at the end.



Thunderbolt 3 utilizes a Type-C connector, this reversible connector is also capable of supporting the USB 3.1 protocol for future devices.

In addition, GIGABYTE is also officially debuting the world's first front panel Thunderbolt 3 drive bay. This bay can be installed in a 5.25" expansion slot and has support for Power Delivery 2.0, up to 100 watts. Users will also get the benefit of having USB 3.1 support in both Type-A as well as Type-C connections.

Lastly, for users whose motherboards do not support Thunderbolt 3 natively, GIGABYTE is also releasing an add-on card, the GC-ALPINE RIDGE. This card is compatible with many GIGABYTE motherboards that have an onboard thunderbolt connector enabling the board to support thunderbolt functionality.

All of these features and products will be available to the public by the beginning of September 2016, for more information on how to get your motherboard Thunderbolt enabled please check on the GIGABYTE website.

GIGABYTE Motherboards already certified with Thunderbolt 3

• GA-X99P-SLI
• GA-Z170X-Gaming G1
• GA-Z170X-Gaming GT
• GA-Z170X-Gaming 7/-EK
• GA-Z170X-UD5 TH
• GA-X170-Extreme ECC

New Models with Thunderbolt 3

• GA-X99-Designare EX
• GA-Z170X-Designare
• GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming
• GA-Z170X-UD3 Ultra
• GA-X170-WS ECC
• GA-H170-Designare

Thunderbolt 3 Accessories

• GP-TBT3 Bay
• GC-ALPINE RIDGE

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Chaitanya]

Seems like Gigabytes choice of USB 3.1 controller on their new motherboards has been a cost saver for users.

 

[Condelio]

Any news of z170n-gaming 5 support? Apparently it's Last firmware supports tb3... Still Don't have any accesory to try the unofficial functionality

 

[EarthDog]

Highly sought after... Oy.

When will TB die? How many devices use it?

Almost feels like Intel keeps pushing this, but, for years now it hasn't gained any REAL traction.

 

[Nobody99]

Highly sought after... Oy.

When will TB die? How many devices use it?

Almost feels like Intel keeps pushing this, but, for years now it hasn't gained any REAL traction.

Thunderbolt is superior to piece-of-shit USB, the only problem lies with Intel and Intel's wish to extort as much money as they can from Thunderbolt's licensees. It even supports peer to peer which is pretty cool feature one that should have been supported by the USB. With peer to peer you could turn a folder on a PC into virtual drive that would show up on directly connected PC with USB connection.

 

[Steevo]

Thunderbolt is superior to piece-of-shit USB, the only problem lies with Intel and Intel's wish to extort as much money as they can from Thunderbolt's licensees. It even supports peer to peer which is pretty cool feature one that should have been supported by the USB. With peer to peer you could turn a folder on a PC into virtual drive that would show up on directly connected PC with USB connection.

USB is hardly shit, much like Beta, HD-DVD, and other standards, the market has spoken. I find USB failures to be the fault of cheap accessories and cheap people who buy them.

 

[EarthDog]

Better or not, it isn't here... nor does it seem it will be? They have been trying for YEARS for market saturation and it hasn't come close to happening.

 

[Nobody99]

USB is hardly shit, much like Beta, HD-DVD, and other standards, the market has spoken. I find USB failures to be the fault of cheap accessories and cheap people who buy them.

Take USB 3.0 power delivey, standard power delivery (what most devices use) is only 4.5W. That is such a joke, they could at least implement 15W or something similar which would let external 3.5" HDD operate without additional power supply. Things like this just shouldn't have happened and now we have the new almighty name USB 3.1 Gen1 which further confuses things and this change in name happened recently and not in the distant past. They keep making these mistakes which aren't excusable in this day and age. I have had trouble with USB 3.0 devices but I don't blame it on USB standard, I blame it on the manufacturer (HP has one of the worst USB 3.0 support in notebooks).

 

[cdawall]

It has semi started taking off. Pretty much every laptop I would even buy has it now, they have some form of selection starting to exist since apple uses it. I give it about a year and we will see useful things on it.

 

[Nobody99]

USB 3.0 docks are basically useless because CPU needs to do work for processing the image but Thunderbolt supported DP lines which made it very useful. Only in 2016 we got USB Type-C which tries to stand up to Thunderbolt. Just detracting USB further.

 

[EarthDog]

LOL, random Thunderbolt facts...

Wake me up when/if its here in a couple years...