Intel Skylake Z170 Motherboards: A Quick Look at 55+ New Products

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• 8steve8 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  how about the 6700k CPUs in the USA?

• Luminair - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  FYI Asus has an alert on BBB for sending people broken products: http://www.bbb.org/greater-san-francisco/business-...
  
  Hundreds of complaints this year, including people with broken motherboard who did an RMA and received in return... a broken motherboard.

• DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Ugh. Are they only testing RMAs after getting them sent back twice? (Assuming the first time is user error, not a hardware fault?)

• apoclypse - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Wow. Remember when motherboards and computer components were ugly? Thos Asrock boards are a work of art. The same with the MSI boards. Not to impressed with what Asus has this time around (in-terms of looks). I've recently built a Haswell-E rig with the X99X from Asrock so I'm not really looking to buy anything but damn those boards make me regret not waiting. Ah well, I needed the extra cores anyway.

• NARC4457 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Am I the only one that is still ridiculously confused at the next generation of fast storage? m.2/nvMe what's bootable, what's not, what pinout (B/M)....
  
  What the hell is going on with these standards (sic)?

• Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  M.2 is a connection standard that can support both SATA and PCIe storage protocols. It is up to the manufacturer to decide which protocol to implement.
  
  SATA drives can use AHCI or IDE, while PCIe drives can be either AHCI or NVMe, but it depends on the controller if NVMe is supported.
  
  Typically NVMe has to be enabled in the BIOS in order to boot from the drive, and you have to install the operating system in UEFI mode - basically Win8.1/10 does this already.
  
  Most Z170 motherboards with M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 should be supporting NVMe devices as boot drives , although I would still refer to the motherboard manufacturers website to confirm this is the case, either on the motherboard's page or in the motherboard's downloadable manual.
  
  Hope that helps.

• NARC4457 - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link

  Thanks Ian, that actually helps a lot.

• joex4444 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  As an owner of a PCIe 2.0 x8 RAID card, I'd love to see someone put out a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot controlled by the PCH that's actually x8. I see a lot of slots that are physically x16, with x8 connectors but the text always refers to them as PCIe 3.0 x4 (PCH). As I've 8 drives connected to that, I want the full x8 connection. Now of course using the second physical x16 slot on SLI boards and taking 8 lanes from the CPU ought to work, but that drops the GPU down to an x8 link; it would be great to use x16/x8 instead of x16/x4 or x8/x8 here (GPU/RAID).
  
  Z170 looked so promising, but so far only X99 offers the PCIe configuration described above.

• Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  The chipset essentially has five PCIe 3.0 x4 controllers, and you can't combine them into an x8. You could use a PCIe bridge chip like a PLX to convert 4 to 8, but you'll still be limited by the four lanes in into the chip. The only way you will get an 8-lane slot is from the processor, unfortunately (because then it would open up GPU possibilities).

• DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Is there any reason other than market segmenting (protecting LGA2011's 40 CPU lanes) or avoiding a single device being able to max out the DMI link for them not to allow combos bigger than a 4x?