We just got word from GIGABYTE that the prize pool they have lined up for the 2017 season has now been upgraded. The company was originally tempting overclockers with a very impressive pool of prizes that included several Intel Core i5 7600K chips – the good news today is that these have now been upped to Core i7 7700K chips. Not bad at all…

The original prize pool from GIGABYTE for the 2017 Season on OC-ESPORTS included a lot of very nice hardware totaling more than $10,000 USD. The pool included AORUS Z270X-Gaming 7 Motherboards, GIGABYTE Radeon RX480 graphics cards, Intel Core processors plus DDR4 memory kits from G.SKILL and PSUs and coolers from Enermax. The original pool included both Core i5 and i7 Kaby Lake offerings – today that changes to Core i7 7700Ks only.

The first contest of the 2017 season is the March Madness contest which runs on OC-ESPORTS for the duration of the month of March. Intel Core i5 chips were included in the original prize list and will be upgraded to Core i7 7700Ks.

Just as a quick contest update, Stage 1 of the March Madness contest finished just two days ago with US overclocker Splave making a late showing to win the Stage with a 3DMark Time Spy Physics score of 6,978 marks. 2016 World Champion marc0053 took second place with a score of 6,962 marks while Germany’s Nik made third place by scoring 6,911 marks. Right now the contest focuses on Geekbench3 Multi-core where Indonesian fatorthin leads the way with 22,251 points.

You can find more information about the GIGABYTE OC Season 2017 here in this press announcement. You can also follow the March Madness contest here on OC-ESPORTS.