Intel Skylake Z170 Motherboards: A Quick Look at 55+ New Products
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 7:59 AM ESTGalleries
Gallery: ASRock Z170
Gallery: ASUS Z170-A
Gallery: ASUS Z170-Deluxe
Gallery: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming
Gallery: ASUS Maximus VIII Gene
Gallery: ASUS Maximus VIII Hero
Gallery: MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK
Gallery: MSI Z170A Gaming M7
Gallery: MSI Z170A Gaming M5
Gallery: MSI Z170A Gaming M3
Gallery: MSI Z170A Gaming PRO
Gallery: MSI Z170A Krait Gaming
Gallery: MSI Z170A PC Mate
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming GT
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 7
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 5
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 3
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-SOC Force
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-UD3
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170X-UD5
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170XP-SLI
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170M-D3H
Gallery: GIGABYTE Z170N-WIFI
Gallery: Supermicro Z170
Gallery: EVGA Z170
Gallery: ECS Z170
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utmode - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Why so many sata express in so many motherboard?Dahak - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Yeah, I dont get that either, it does not seem like anyone is doing sata express drives, when NVMe is about to come out. Although its only wasting board space as the SateExpress port can double as 2xSATA ports. I was kinda hoping they would have dropped it for this. Maybe on the other chipsets?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I think the reason lies in the marketing departments wanting to tick a box in the marketing materials. When one manufacturer includes it, everyone follows the suit so their products won't look "inferior" compared to competitors'. It's no secret that SATA Express is practically dead (although I would say it's a miscarriage), but to those with less technical knowledge it may sound cool and better than regular SATA, even though they will end up using SATAe as regular SATA.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
ASRock have their USB 3.1 front panel which uses SATA Express, so there's finally some use for it.silenceisgolden - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
It would work better for marketing departments if they market that they "did not bother with the useless standard, SATA Express".DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
The design cycle for these boards probably started a good year ago. By the time it became clear that Sata-Express was a dead standard it was too late to make any major design changes for the initial wave of boards.Slash3 - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
As someone with 10 SATA devices, I very much appreciate I/O overkill. :)phorgan1 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
You can get more sata in less lanes. Once you use up lanes for nvme drives and graphics cards, the smaller groupings won't support more cards or nvme drives (cards need x8 or x16 and nvme drives need x4) the left overs will support usb and sata. Since sata is such lower bandwidth you can still fit a lot of sata in around the fringes, so why not? A sata ssd is still pretty fast.prophet001 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Why no slot for M.2 drives?prophet001 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Nevermind. Hadn't fully read the article.