Three of Gigabyte's Z97 Motherboards Revealed
Gigabyte has revealed three shiny new Z97 motherboards.
Gigabyte is showing off a number of its upcoming motherboards – three to be precise. While the numbering on some of the images is blurred out, it's fairly safe to assume that the release is all about the Z97X0-UD5H-BK, the Z97X-UD7 TH and the Z97X-SOC FORCE. These motherboards are all based on the next generation of chipsets from Intel and will therefore have support for not only the Haswell refresh processors, but also the existing Haswell processors. The whole lot also has support for CrossFire and SLI graphics configurations.
There's also a connector for the new SATA-Express standard on these mobos, and the Z97X-UD5H-BK has an M.2 slot beside the "10 Gb/s" marking, which makes it very clear that this M.2 slot does not run over a SATA3 (6 Gb/s) interface. The Z97X-UD7 TH comes with Thunderbolt 2 support, as the name implies.
Lastly, the Z97X-SOC FORCE is the board primed for overclocking in this lineup. Besides an additional 4-pin EPS connector, it also has one more PCIe x16 slot compared to the other two boards.
More details have yet to surface, but this does give us a pretty good idea of what Gigabyte's lineup will look like. Stay tuned for more when the motherboards officially get released.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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exar333 Should the Z97X-UD5H-BK comment say it DOES run above (instead of does not) the SATA3 6GB/s port?Reply -
CBHorn that 10gb/s m2 port should come on all of the boards.
+1, that's the only really good feature Z97 has over Z87
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jasonelmore that 10gb/s m2 port should come on all of the boards.
+1, that's the only really good feature Z97 has over Z87
yeah but they need to make sure they put it on the mini ITX/micro ATX boards. These big boards are gonna go in big cases, and m.2 ssd is not needed with thunderbolt on my asus boards
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de5_Roy censoring, really? it's like blurring the nose, thinking no one will recognize the face. you can just zoom in on the mobo images and see the model number over the 1st pcie x16 slot.Reply