22 Phase Power Design |
Since quite some time Gigabyte has been equipping its boards with digital power designs. With the GA-Z170X-Gaming G1 they are using soley components from International Rectifyer. Additionally Gigabyte makes use of black solid caps which are rated at a minimum 10'000 hours liefespan at 105°C. |
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Sound Core 3D |
Gigabyte is offering a seriously beefed-up audio implementation for this motherboard. The center of it is a Creative Sound Core 3D Audiochip, which is being supported by an armada of additional chips. There is for example a Burr-Brown DAC and Gigabyte is using fine gold Nichicon caps as well as WIMA film cap. Furthermore there are swappable OP-AMPs for the front audio as well as for the left and the right channel. |
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SATA Express
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SATA Express is a new port for storage devices that basically combines two SATA connectors and bundles them. Each SATA Express port has been wired using two PCI Express Gen 3 lanes offering a total of 16 Gbps bandwidth. Compared to SATA-III with 6 Gbps bandwidth this is quite an improvement. |
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M.2 / NVMe support
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The new Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming G1 motherboard features two M.2 slot and included in the delivery there is also an NVMe adapter card. This motherboard can be equipped with two SSDs in M.2 format and they are wired to a PLX PEX8747 lan multiplexer using four PCI Express Gen 3 lanes each. Therefore each slot offers up to 4 Gigabyte per second bandwidth. |
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PLX Chip
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So far this is the only Z170-based motherboard, that comes with a PLX chip. To be a bit more precise there is 48-lane, 5 port PCIe Gen 3 switch from Avago, called PEX 8747. Thanks to this chip the G1 Gaming motherboard supports 4-way SLI with x16/x8/x16/x8 configuration. Apart from that there are enough PCI Express Gen 3 lanes, that all components can be used simultaneously and no ports have to share lanes. |
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ASUS Z170 Deluxe Review 