The new Supermicro Z170 Express chipset based C7Z170-OCE motherboard has appeared online and it comes with a rather unique color scheme and a PLX PEX8747 PCIe switch which should provide plenty of PCIe lanes for multi-GPU configuration or other PCIe-based devices.

While Supermicro has been around for a while, the company has been mostly focused on the server market. Recently, Supermicro is making a big push into the consumer market and actually uses the same high-quality components and engineers that worked on server motherboards, promising some impressive quality and performance from their upcoming motherboards and could easily become the new DFI if they play things right.

Pictured by Tweaktown.com, the new C7Z170-OCE motherboard from Supermicro has a rather interesting green/black color scheme, which is at least unique. It also comes with a PEX 8747 PCI-Express chip which is a 48-lane, 5-port PCI-Express Gen 3 switch.

While most Intel Z170 Express-based motherboards have 20 PCI-Express 3.0 lans from the PCH and 16 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes from the CPU, but come with three PCI-Express 3.0 slots, they usually end up working at x16-x0-x0, x8-x8-x0, or x8-x4-x4. PCI-Express lanes are shared among many ports and while most users won't use them all, some users are limited and end up choosing which ports to use.

The new Supermicro C7Z170-OCE motherboard with PLX PEX 8747 PCI-Express switch chip should fix those as this chip takes 16 lanes from the CPU and turns them to 48 PCI-Express lanes, which means that you would actually get plenty of additional lanes for x16, x16 multi-GPU action and even give enough PCI-Express lanes to use other devices on the third PCI-Express slot, like for example, pair up Intel 750 PCIe x4 SSD with dual-GPU setup.

Supermicro did not officially announce this motherboard so hopefully we will hear more about it soon.





Source: Tweaktown Facebook.