Huananzhi, a popular Chinese motherboard manufacturer, recently announced the brand's new Gaming X99-TF motherboard that supports both DDR3 and DDR4 memory modules.
Huananzhi has gone with a black-and-white theme with the Gaming X99-TF. The ATX motherboard is carved from a matte black, 10-layer PCB and features white heatsinks. It draws power from your typical 8-pin EPS and 24-pin power connectors. The Gaming X99-TF has a six-phase power delivery subsystem, and a pair of tiny fans provide the aforementioned area with active cooling. The motherboard vendor claims that the fans are capable of lowering the area's temperature from 20 to 30 degrees.
The LGA 2011-v3 socket itself is surrounded by two DDR3 and two DDR4 memory slots on each side. Therefore, the Gaming X99-TF can accommodate up to 128GB of memory. The supported memory speeds for DDR3 and DDR4 max out at 1,866 MHz and 2,400 MHz, respectively. The catch is that you can only use one type of memory at a time. Huananzhi notes that DDR3 memory only works on a handful Haswell Xeon chips, including the E5-2678 v3, E5-2696 v3, E5-2629 v2, E5-2649 v3, E5-2669 v3, E5-2672 v3, and E5-2673 v3.
In regards to storage options, the Gaming X99-TF delivers eight SATA III ports and two M.2 2280 ports for connecting your hard drives and SSDs. The motherboard doesn't arrive with wireless connectivity. However, the third M.2 slot is designed exclusively for M.2 wireless cards. As for expansions slots, the motherboard is equipped two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and two PCIe 3.0 x1 slots.
The motherboard's rear panel houses two PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet port, five analog audio jacks, and an optical S/PDIF out connector. Two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 headers are present as well. The Gaming X99-TF even comes with a couple of onboard buttons and a numeric diagnostics panel.
The Gaming X99-TF carries a price tag of 698 yuan, which translates approximately to $97.46. Huananzhi backs the motherboard with a limited three-year warranty.
