Thunderbolt 3 Support Comes To Gigabyte GA-Z170X Gaming Motherboards Via Firmware Update

[kcarbotte]

Gigabyte’s GA-Z170X Gaming G1, GT and 7 motherboards are now certified for Thunderbolt 3. A free firmware update has been released for each of them to enable the higher bandwidth protocol.

Thunderbolt 3 Support Comes To Gigabyte GA-Z170X Gaming Motherboards Via Firmware Update : Read more

 

[jas69]

Bring it on. Now I'd like to see it to connect my 5 bay NAS

 

[Rheotome]

Glad to see Gigabyte expanding the Thunderbolt 3 capability to some other MBs. I'd like to see some other offerings from Asus before the year ends. Some place I read that the availability of the Alpine Ridge controllers was "supply constrained" I wonder if that means that a sweetheart deal was cut with Intel to make Gigabyte first out of the blocks with TB3 MBs ??

 

[hst101rox]

~5GB/s! That's crazy awesome. Just stupid for a consumer to have ha. I guess it'll eventually be in thin and light laptops if not already in the works.

 

[QSV]

Good. So maybe now they can put more effort into getting the basic features of the rest of their firmwares working. Still feels like Skylake release was only days ago.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

I'd like to see the Alpine Ridge controller on a mini-ITX board. Make it happen, Gigabyte!

 

[JacFlasche]

Thank you for this news. I haven't been able to find a review of the Z170X-UD5 TH anywhere for weeks. Now I can look up these other board's reviews and see if they are worthy of my next build.

I would really like to see a review of one or all of these boards. Theoretically that is all that is keeping me from buying one. Asus will be using their own chip from a subsidy to deliver TB3 -- first as an add-on card I believe. And then their is this

ASUS Z170-Premium to contain Thunderbolt 3 and a U.2 port

http://www.overclock3d.net/articles/cpu_mainboard/asus_z170-premium_to_contain_thunderbolt_3_and_a_u_2_port/1

Some of those notebooks with TB 3 are already for sale.

And of course the big push to finally allow docking of laptops to some serious GPU power via TB3 without all the fuss that is now involved in rigging your own eGPU setup. I have also seen some little external TB3 devices coming out for laptops. At this point I wouldn't purchase either a laptop or a motherboard without it, even if it is in the form of a card or external enclosure.

I guess TB3 could run two 4k displays in a VR HUD, if anyone would care to build one for me. Can you imagine the pixel density.