Biostar To Showcase Intel 100-Series Chipsets At Computex

Biostar will be showcasing motherboards packing Intel's 100-series chipsets that support Intel's sixth generation of Core processors, codenamed Skylake, the company announced in its latest press release. We've heard rumors before pointing towards the 100-series chipsets aimed at Skylake processors, but this is the first form of official confirmation, albeit from Biostar, and not Intel.

Biostar will have boards on demo at Computex with the Z170 chipset, the H170 chipset, and the B150 chips. The Z-series chipsets are generally the full-featured parts with overclocking capabilities. The H-series matches the features of the Z-series, but without the overclocking support, and the B-series is oriented towards businesses and budget platforms. The board pictured is the Gaming Z170X4 without any heatsinks installed. Just by looking at the photo, the most notable feature appears to be the three SATA-Express slots.

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Additionally, in the same press release Biostar announced its Gaming Z97X motherboard -- a board aimed at high-performance enthusiasts. It is "designed from the ground up to be cool looking and high performing," and comes with Hi-Fi audio, dual Gigabit Ethernet (one of which is driven by a Killer NIC), dual HDMI ports, DisplayPort, along with USB 3.1, an M.2 slot, SATA-Express, and more. It also comes with overclocking features, which includes an LN2 mode switch to warm up the motherboard, protecting it from condensation. More details will also be revealed at Computex, which runs from June 2 through 6.

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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

8 Comments Comment from the forums

PaulBags

How many m.2 is that? 3 or 4? I'm disappointed in 3 sata express, A) there are still no sata express drives, and they're already made obsolete by pci-e nvme B) that's only 6 standard sata, I'd want at least 8.
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TechyInAZ

Looks cool! Wow though, 3 M.2 10GB slots!!
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ykki

When you say that the h170 matches the features of the z170, is SLI also included in those features? To my knowledge h97 doesn't support SLI and it would be great to see the h170 boards to support SLI because then we can pair Xeons with these new h-series mobos and still have that upgrade path option.

Ps= That is a good lookin' board. Biostar doesn't mess around by putting too much useless things on the mobo. Wonder what it will look like when all the heat-sinks are put into place.
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PaulBags

15910963 said:
When you say that the h170 matches the features of the z170, is SLI also included in those features? To my knowledge h97 doesn't support SLI and it would be great to see the h170 boards to support SLI because then we can pair Xeons with these new h-series mobos and still have that upgrade path option.

Ps= That is a good lookin' board. Biostar doesn't mess around by putting too much useless things on the mobo. Wonder what it will look like when all the heat-sinks are put into place.
If you're right about the h97 then SLI isn't supported on h97 because the lanes can't be split to 8/8. Skylake should have more lanes, so two pci-e connectors at 16/8 should be possible without spliting. Depends on the board though, we'll just have to wait and see.

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jasonelmore

Skylake just has 4 extra lanes, which will almost always be dedicated to NVME storage.

Broadwell = 16 lanes
Haswell= 16 Lanes
Haswell-E= 40 lanes
Haswell E 5820k= 28 Lanes
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PaulBags

Just 4 extra? Meh, then.
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Hotthuizen

Nice motherbord, but i will wait for AMD ZEN to come out.

Amd ZEN cpu's will get 22 pci lanes ;)

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2Be_or_Not2Be

I wish the industry would put SATA Express to rest. Keep M.2 as the interim high-performance interface (PCIe x2/x4), and go with NVMe for the long-term.

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