Consumer Electronics Show 2015 Gigabyte Visit

Gigabyte had several new times on display starting with the X99 SOC Champion.  This is basically a revision of the X99 SOC Force designed specifically for overclockers and hardware enthusiasts.  The design follows a similar formula to the elusive Z97 SOC Force LN2 by brining the memory slots in closer to the CPU socket for better frequency response. 

They also reduced the available memory slots down to a single slot per channel.  Vendors like Foxconn, Soltek and Abit did this for years (back in the day) and while overclocking was better they often got jabbed by consumers for not giving them affordable memory expandability.  By spinning the Champion off as a special edition motherboard they can remove some of that from the equation.

Some of the other features of the X99 SOC Champion are the removal of the benchtop buttons and the addition of a small switch to enable or disable the enhanced CPU socket.  Some of you may not know what that means but if you ever get bored try counting the pin pads on a Core i7 5960x and you'll find there are a few more than 2011.  The new socket allows you to supply voltage to these pin pads which in turn can help with certain overclocking situations.

Gigabyte was also showing off their new revision of the Waterforce using GTX 980 graphics cards.  This is an external watercooling module coupled with three Gigabyte GTX 980 graphics cards.  The external module controls the cooling of the cards and can display vital stats on the LED displays.  Each card comes with a factory overclock and can be overclocked further if you need more power from a three way SLI setup.

One of the final highlight item for us was the new Force H5 and Force H7 gaming headsets.  Each headset comes with a digital audio controller with the primary difference being that the H7 is interpolated 7.1 while the H5 is a more traditional multi driver 5.1.

The form factor for each headset is the same so It will be interesting to see how these sound in a quiet gaming environment.  Some say that 7.1 is better however given the multi driver configuration of the 5.1 we're just not sure.