Gigabyte launches a trio of X299X motherboards for Cascade Lake-X

Intel’s Cascade Lake-X CPU lineup is not set to be transformative on the performance front, but then it comes to both pricing and platform features, Cascade Lake-X is set to be a gamechanger. 

With Cascade Lake-X comes new X299X motherboards, enhancing Intel’s X299 platform with advanced features like 5/10Gb LAN ports, Thunderbolt 3 support and WiFi 6 technology. Add this to Cascade Lake-X’s extra platform PCIe lanes, and extended DDR4 support (32GB DIMM support), and we can see why Cascade Lake-X has a lot of high-end users excited. 

So far, Gigabyte has announced three new X299X motherboards for Intel’s Cascade Lake-X series processors. All of these motherboards will use Intel’s X299 socket, supporting both Skylake-X and Cascade Lake-X processors out of the box. Older X299 motherboards will support Cascade Lake-X with the right BIOS update, assuming your motherboard’s manufacturer has made an effort to update it. That said, Cascade Lake-X’s extra PCIe lanes and X299X’s new platform features will only be available on new motherboards.

Starting with Gigabyte’s premium X299X Designare 10G motherboard, we can see that the company has gone all-in on fast networking, offering WiFi 6 802.11ax support and two integrated 10GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) ports through Intel’s server-grade X550-AT2 chipset. 

The Gigabyte Designare also offers users dual Thunderbolt 3 connections, offering full 40Gbps speeds. On top of the board’s three integrated M.2 slots, the motherboard also ships with an  AORUS Gen4 AIC Adaptor that allows users to add four additional M.2 SSDs to their system over PCIe 3.0. 

This motherboard features support for up to 256GB of DDR4 memory when used with Cascade Lake-X processors at speeds of up to 2933MHz without overclocking. To power the user’s processor, this motherboard uses a 12-phase IR Digital VRM solution with 70A power stages. 

Moving down to the low-end, we have the X299X Aorus Master, which also supports up to 256GB of DDR4 memory. While this board lacks Thunderbolt 3.0 support (without the addition of an Add-in card), the Aorus Master does contain support for Intel WiFi 6 and support for 5GbE through an Aquantia LAN controller. The motherboard also supports standard Gb ethernet using an extra LAN port. This board also offers users a 12-phase VRM and three PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots and a total of eight SATA connections.