We already knew that Gigabyte is working on a completely new lineup of motherboards based on Intel's X99 chipset and although these will officially be unveiled at Computex 2016 next week, the company has decided to show them ahead of the show.
Bringing out-of-the-box support for Intel's upcoming Broadwell-E HEDT CPUs, the new motherboards will still be based on a well known X99 Express chipset with socket LGA 2011-3 but also bring an updated connectivity options and plenty of other updates, like RGB LEDs, new names and new color schemes.
Gigabyte has decided to unveil a total of three new motherboards, the X99-Designare EX, the X99-Ultra Gaming, and the X99-SLI Phoenix. Based on a black PCB with white heatsinks and either red or blue accents, depending on the model, these new motherboards will come with Gigabyte's RGB Ambient Surround LED feature, with LEDs all around the motherboard. Some models will also feature reinforced PCI-Express slots and plenty of other features.
The flagship Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX will feature an E-ATX form-factor, white/blue color scheme, a total of five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, and will feature plenty of storage connectivity options, like two SATA-Express ports, eight SATA 6Gbps ports, two 32Gbps U.2 ports, probably an M.2 slot and more.
The Gigabyte GA-X99 Ultra Gaming motherboard is more oriented at gamers, as it only comes with four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, a full-length M.2 slot and only one 32Gbps U.2 ports. It still retains SATA-Express ports and uses white/red color scheme and much less heatsink shrouds. The GA-X99 Ultra Gaming also lacks integrated WiFi and does not come with reinforced memory slots.
The X99-SLI Phoenix is still an unknown, but we expect this one to be an even cheaper version with even less features. We were quite surprised that Gigabyte used a specific color on heatsinks which would be hard to match with LEDs but we still did not see them in action so it might even look good.
The entire lineup will be officially unveiled at Computex 2016 so we will take a closer look.
Source:
Gigabyte.com.