Gigabyte has unveiled its first trio of motherboards designed especially to take advantage of the HEDT Cascade Lake-X chips Intel launched earlier in the week. The X299X Designare 10G, X299X Aorus Xtreme WaterForce, and the X299X Aorus Master all, of course, use the upgraded X299X chipset from Intel to eke out the most efficient performance from the latest Intel Core X series processors.
These new motherboards are expected to be paired with a new Cascade Lake-X chip, up to 8x DIMMs in Quad Channel DDR4 mode (up to 256GB of RAM), with fully validated support for Quadro graphics cards, and lightning-quick Intel Thunderbolt 3 devices - to delight the most demanding content creators working in the fields of 3D modelling, audio/visual editing, and projects that require large-scale system resources. Gigabyte says gamers might find these motherboards attractive too.
Gigabyte hasn't furnished us with the full details of each new X299 board launched today. Instead we learn the following key specs will be present across the range:
- Support for Intel Cascade Lake-X out of the box
- Fully validated support for Nvidia Quadro graphics cards
- Up to 16-phase power designs with a capacity of 70A per phase
- Support for up to 8x DIMMs in Quad Channel DDR4 mode (256GB max memory, 8x 32GB)
- Thunderbolt 3 USB-C interfaces for up to 40Gb/s bandwidth plus USB 3.2 and DP 1.2 support
- 5Gbps or 10Gbps wired network connectivity plus built-in Wi-Fi 6 hardware
- Built-in NVMe PCIe x4 M.2 slots (Optane compatible) with single slot transmission speeds up to 32Gb/s
- M.2 Thermal Guard
- Ultra durable components
- The WaterForce and Designare boards include the Aorus Gen4 AIC Adaptor which offers users four additional M.2 PCIe X4 slots for increased SSD expansion plus active cooling
- PCIe slot armour
- ALC 1220-VB IC and professional-grade ESS 9218 SABRE DACs plus Gigabyte AMP-UP Audio and DTS: X Ultra, DTS Headphone: X tech
- Smart Fan 5 cooling plus finned heatsink armour and heat pipes over important components
Gigabyte hasn't published the product pages for the X299X Designare 10G, X299X Aorus Xtreme WaterForce, and the X299X Aorus Master at the time of writing. Thus we don't have much in the way of cold hard specs for these SKUs. We expect more than this initial salvo of three boards as it created 14 variants based upon the X299 chipset.
