Gigabyte Intros Eight X99 Motherboards

By Kevin Parrish
published

Gigabyte on Friday introduced eight motherboards based on the Intel X99 chipset. These boards support the latest DDR4 memory as well as Intel's new i7 Extreme Edition processors. Gigabyte's arsenal includes three gaming boards, one SoC overclocking board and four Ultra Durable boards.

The new motherboards feature an all-digital CPU power design from International Rectifier. They also feature special server level chokes by Cooper Bussmann, which means a reduction of heat, high current capacity and server level reliability.

Gigabyte's long list of features include Durable Black solid caps and POSCAPS, 3-way and 4-way graphics configurations for up to 320 Gbps bandwidth, and dual M.2 technology with on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There's also a Turbo M.2 socket, an on-board SATA Express connector and a 30 micron-thick gold-plating over the 8 DIMM slots, the CPU socket and 4 PCIe slots.

One of the biggest fears about building a system is accidental damage when mounting the motherboard. With Gigabyte's new layout, those fears are minimized thanks to additional space around the mounting hole, and a wider copper ground pad.

"Gigabyte's exclusive 2X Copper PCBs design provides sufficient power trace paths between components to handle greater than normal power loads and to remove heat from the critical CPU power delivery area," the press release said. "This is essential to ensure the motherboard is able to handle the increased power loading that is necessary when overclocking."

On the audio front, the new boards include Creative's Sound Core3D quad-core audio processor and the Creative SBX Pro Studio audio suite software. There is also Realtek's ALC1150 high-performance multi-channel High Definition Audio Codec, which provides ten DAC channels that, when combined, will support 7.1-sound audio playback.

Gigabyte's new motherboards also sport new heatsink designs, LED lighting for the back panel LED and the audio guard light path, Q-Flash Plus (which allows users to update the BIOS with a flash drive), Killer E2200 networking, cFos Speed (a network traffic management application) and Thunderbolt connectivity.

For more information about the new motherboards, click on one of the links below:

Gaming

 SOC

 Ultra Durable

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Kevin Parrish
22 Comments Comment from the forums
  • LukaBoki
    Even better than the ASUS Rampage V Extreme.
    Reply
  • irish_adam
    Am i the only one that cant understand why these manufacturers are pouring all this money into making gaming boards for haswell E? i mean the reviews showed that in games even with the top end CPU your only looking at an average of 1-2 frames extra. How stupid do you have to be to cough up $1600 on a platform change that gives you so little? Even if i was a multi millionaire i wouldnt even bother. Its wouldnt be worth the time it took me to put together
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    14064579 said:
    i mean the reviews showed that in games even with the top end CPU your only looking at an average of 1-2 frames extra. How stupid do you have to be to cough up $1600 on a platform change that gives you so little?
    Some people use their systems for stuff aside from gaming and as the benchmarks showed, the 5960X does perform a fair bit better than the 4960X for productivity and media rendering/encoding tasks that scale across multiple cores.

    I would not buy one for myself either since so few of the programs I use are meaningfully threaded and the few that are account for a small fraction of my total time but I can imagine why people who do tons of those sorts of tasks might want to consider the two extra cores.

    My own question would be: is there really so much of a market for LGA2011-3 motherboards to justify a single manufacturer producing eight variants of their X99 boards? For the minor variations between boards, it might be cheaper to drop the lower-end variants and reduce the higher-end board's price tag than warehouse two slightly different boards.
    Reply
  • tom10167
    These boards seem incredible, definitely more exciting hardware than Asus is offering.

    8 different models is ridiculous though. How about 5,it just makes it so much l3ss confusing.
    Reply
  • SirTrollsALot
    I assume they got some kick ass manufacturing process to pull these 8 variants.Who knows maybe in the next 20 years we the consumer may be able to get a custom ordered MoBo! How cool would that be!
    Reply
  • tom10167
    These boards seem incredible, definitely more exciting hardware than Asus is offering.

    8 different models is ridiculous though. How about 5,it just makes it so much l3ss confusing.
    Reply
  • IQ11110002
    Those saying it's not worth it probably can't afford it!
    Don't need Ferraris and Lamborghinis either as any car will get you from a-b, But I would sure as hell like to have one. ;)
    You also are not thinking about future where next iteration of direct x and the like will be using more cores instead of offloading most work onto 1 core, So even for games you will see an improvement not just for productivity.
    If you are tight on money then get Z97 nothing wrong with that platform.
    Reply
  • msahni
    Does the Dual M.2 support using 2 SSDs in RAID cause those are the only ports that really provide a faster drive speed .... Surprisingly there is no ULTRA m.2 x4 here as those SSDs are starting to show up whereas Sata Express SSDs are still a pipe dream.
    Reply
  • Fierce Guppy
    I was always good at those spot-the-difference picture games, but I'll be buggered if I can spot any differences between the GA-X99-Gaming 7 WiFi and the GA-X99-Gaming G1 WiFi. That's right. Not one! There must be some fine detail that evades my spidey senses.

    http://www.gigabyte.com/products/comparison/list.aspx?ck=2&pids=5128,5126
    Reply
  • irish_adam
    Those saying it's not worth it probably can't afford it!
    Don't need Ferraris and Lamborghinis either as any car will get you from a-b, But I would sure as hell like to have one. ;)
    You also are not thinking about future where next iteration of direct x and the like will be using more cores instead of offloading most work onto 1 core, So even for games you will see an improvement not just for productivity.
    If you are tight on money then get Z97 nothing wrong with that platform.

    If you had a year old Ferrari and they released a model that was 1-2mph faster would you buy it solely for that reason?

    I understand the benefits for non-gaming my comment was more to do with the fact that a lot of these boards are directly aimed at gamers, also the amounts of varrients. Dont get me wrong i like a good choice but i'd like to see actual numbers of each board sold because it cannot be that high
    Reply