Computex 2015: Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti WF and G1 Gaming Mobos

As always Gigabyte has two venues where they have their products on display, the TWCC building, a secondary exhibition location, and for VIP guests located in the way too high Taipei 101 they have a room.

We have a peek at some of the product on display at the Taipei 101. Gigabyte is showing a multitude of motherboards like Z97, X99 and the new Series 100 boards.

VGA wise on display is the entire range including the new GTX 980 Ti and already released 960/970 series. Prominent on display are Windforce based coolers, which we like very much, any graphics card they released we pretty much reviewed. But hey, that's a good thing of course. Ehm, not one Radeon card was on display though.
 

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming with 600W Windforce cooler is of course the talk of the town, this model will receive a revised Windforce 3X cooler that can manage 600W of cooling performance. The design is typical tri-fan, but some new accents have been made on the cooler shell. The product will fall under the G1 Gaming branding with SKU number N98TG1-Gaming-6GD.
 

There are small LED accents on the cooler and the top Windforce logo is now color configurable, meaning that if you have a red themed motherboard, you can turn the logo to red, or any other color of your preference. Obviously the card is fitted with a nice and proper backplate. The board is in near final stages, a clock frequency has not been announced just yet but we expect a 1200~1250 MHz base clock to be honest. The memory clock frequency will be slightly tweaked to 7.1 Ghz as well.
 

Force K83 mechanical keyboard - new in the keyboard range is a very simple yet subtle mechanical keyboard based on red Cherry MX switches. It seems to be a nice simple set of keys, not with all the bells and whistles like 16M color configurations etc, plan and simple at roughly a 100 EURO.

In the G1 Gaming series there was also one motherboard we like to point out, the GA-Z170X Gaming G1, this skylake motherboard looks fantastic. The new Z170 motherboards all will get a USB 3.1 port, Gigabyte is adding a thunderbolt chip, that can actually function and drive a USB 3.1 port. The chip comes from intel,a nd everything Intel and thunderbolt related, is expensive - that we know for a fact. A good thing about this USB 3.1 port is that it can carry up-to 36 Watts of power, very handy if you quickly need to charge devices. 
 

If you peek at the PCI-Express slots for example, you will notice metal shielding surrounding the slot. This is not done for aesthetic reasoning, but to provide a more sturdy slot for heavy graphics cards. Well, that and it looks cool I guess.

There is one M2 slot available, yet it runs over a x4 lane configuration meaning a whopping 32 Gbps connection for the fastest M2 SSDs you can find, and we did see some nice ones here at Computex alright. The board comes with HDMI 2.0, though we doubt you'll be using the integrated GPU on the processor. New are the PCB traces that are LED lit, you can assing one of 7 colors to them. NIC wise both an Intel and a Aetheros Killer NIC Gigabit jack are present, so you can opt and choose based on your preference.

In the photo's below some more coverage of other series 100 motherboards for Skylake and a thing or two extra we found interesting enough to show.