Gigabyte show off upcoming X99 motherboards
Gigabyte show off upcoming X99 motherboards
Published: 24th April 2016 | Source: Gamers Nexus |
Gigabyte shows off upcoming X99 motherboards
Gigabyte has shown off three upcoming X99 motherboards at PAX East, offering M.2 and U.2 SSD support, a brand new aesthetic, and support for Intel's upcoming Broadwell-E platform.
These new motherboards come with a similar aesthetic to their current selection of Z170 motherboards, with the motherboards on show offering a red and white colour scheme or a blue and white colour scheme.
Below you can see pictures of Gigabyte's GA-X99-Designare EX, which is a new model from Gigabyte that is designed to offer a lot of a large selection of storage connection options and a total of 5 full-length PCI-e slots. The first second and fourth PCIe slots will operate at x16 speeds while the third slot will work at x4 and the fifth will work at x8 speeds.
Storage wise the Designare will offer a large number of SATA ports, SATA Express support and two U.2 connections for NVMe storage. Right now we expect that there will be an M.2 slot between the first two PCIe 16x lanes, but it is expected that it will only offer support shorter M.2 products.
The Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI G1 has a lot of similarities to the Designare, but it makes some key changes, first it trades its third PCIe slot with a full-length M.2 slot and takes away a single U.2 SSD connection. We see the blue and white colour scheme switched with a red and orange one, with this motherboard offering much less white shrouding.
It looks like this motherboard has a built in M.2 wireless card and supports a lot of SATA storage devices.
Moving onto the Gigabyte GA-X99 Ultra Gaming motherboard we can see that it is very similar to the GA-X99 Pheonix, but it does not offer the build in wireless card and has only used black PCIe and DDR4 memory slots.
Personally, I prefer the black and red aesthetic of this motherboard to the white and Orange X99 SLI Gaming Pheonix, but it is great to see that white and orange is an option.
Hopefully, we will see a wide selection of new X99 motherboards enter the market in preparation for Intel's upcoming Broadwell-E CPUs.
While there are not many differences between existing X99 motherboards on the CPU side, but they do offer expanded storage options that bring these new motherboards in line with Intel's newer Z170 platform.
You can join the discussion on Gigabyte's upcoming X99 motherboards on the OC3D Forums.
Gigabyte has shown off three upcoming X99 motherboards, offering M.2 and U.2 SSD support.https://t.co/HimNlXHQ4L pic.twitter.com/x0anbtgL96
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