Gigabyte showcase three upcoming X99 motherboards at PAX East, offering support for Intel’s upcoming Broadwell-E platform with M.2 and U.2 SSD support. The new boards feature a brand new aesthetic similar to current Z170 motherboards, with G1 series offering a red and white colour scheme and Ultra Durable series with a blue and white colour scheme.
The first one is Gigabyte’s GA-X99-Designare EX, which is a new model from Gigabyte that is designed to offer more 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.
For storage connectivity wise the GA-X99-Designare EX will feature a large number of SATA ports, SATA Express support and two U.2 connections for NVMe storage.
Next is the Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI G1, which is a lot of similar to the Designare EX, but focus on the gaming side of things, first switched colour scheme to orange and white. The board supports a full-length M.2 slot and a shot-length M.2 slot. As the picture shows, this motherboard has a built in M.2 wireless card and supports a lot of SATA storage devices with single U.2 SSD connection.
Moving onto the Gigabyte GA-X99 Ultra Gaming motherboard we can see that it is very similar to the GA-X99 Pheonix, but with a red and white colour scheme, but has full black PCIe and DDR4 memory slots.
While there are not many differences between existing X99 motherboards and the new motherboards, but they do offer updated storage options that bring buy Intel’s newer Z170 platform.
