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

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

 

Right now we have not seen very many ultra high end Skylake motherboards, but this does not mean that they are not coming. 

We already know that ASUS will be releasing motherboards which are higher end than their ROG Maximus Hero and Z170 Deluxe motherboards, as we have already seen images of ASUS’s Maximus VIII Extreme, but until now we have had no clear indication of what exactly will set these motherboards apart from their lower end counterparts. 

    

Thanks to Benchlife.info we now have our first leaked images of ASUS’s Z170 Premium motherboard, which will be ASUS’s highest end Z170 motherboard  that is outside of the ROG series. 

On this motherboard we will have support for Thunderbolt 3.0, which uses the same connector as this motherboards USB 3.1 connector, meaning that this motherboard will be able to use Thunderbolt 3 devices at their full speed. Since Thunderbolt 3.0 is 4x faster than USB 3.1 this will allow this motherboard to easily daisy chain several devices onto a single Thunderbolt connector. 

 

  

ASUS’ Z170 Premium motherboard will also be one of the first motherboards to come to market which has a integrated U.2 connector, which will allow this motherboard to be connected to ultra fast NVMe SSDs like Intel’s 750 series SSDs and other upcoming U.2 SSDs. 

This connector is something that we expect to become much more common moving into the future, but right now it will only be present on ultra high end motherboards. Adapters are available to convert an M.2 slot to a U.2 slot, but these are not widely available right now. 

 

  

Right now we have no clear release date for ASUS’ upcoming Z170 Premium motherboard, but we hope to be seeing more of this motherboard and other ultra high end Z170 motherboard within the coming weeks.  

 

You can join the discussion on ASUS’s Z170-Premium motherboard on the OC3D Forums.