One thing that you need to look at very closely before buying a new motherboard for your next PC DIY project is the onboard available connectivity. Having the latest connectivity such as SATA Express, M.2 or event Thunderbolt™ support means that you will not be left behind in terms of fast transfer speed or upgrades with the latest technology.
Next Generation SATA Express Connector
GIGABYTE X99 series motherboards feature an onboard SATA Express connector which provides performance far superior to that of current SATA technologies. SATA Express features data transfer rates of up to 10Gb/s, considerably higher than SATA Revision 3 (6Gb/s), which won’t bottleneck faster NAND flash technologies in cutting edge SSDs. SATA Express combines the benefits of PCI-Express and SATA to provide much higher bandwidth, allowing SATA Express based drives to perform at similar speeds as PCI-Express based drives.
Dual M.2 Technology with Onboard WIFI and Bluetooth 4.0
GIGABYTE X99 motherboards with Dual M.2 technology provides users PCI-Express connectivity for SSD devices and onboard 11AC WIFI + Bluetooth 4.0. Delivering up to 10 Gb/s data transfer speeds, M.2 offers considerably faster storage performance than current mSATA and even SATA Revision 3 (6Gb/s) storage devices. GIGABYTE’s stacked design optimizes the PCB real-estate usage, allowing more components to be efficiently added without compromising any space.
Turbo M.2 Technology
GIGABYTES X99 SOC motherboards feature a Turbo M.2 socket to provide compact connectivity for SSD devices. Thanks to the unique design from the X99 chipset, 4 PCIe (Gen.2) lanes can be allocated to the M.2 socket, unlocking up to 20 Gb/s of bandwidth.
Thunderbolt™ Ready
GIGABYTE X99 brings the expandability needed to make your system the ultimate one with an onboard pin header to accommodate the addition of a GIGABYTE Thunderbolt™ add-in card. The Thunderbolt™ controller can provide bandwidth of up to 20 Gb/s, compared to a max of 10 Gb/s on previous generation designs. This allows for incredible data transfer speeds when using high performance storage devices, while also supporting daisy-chaining of up to 12 devices and triple digital display support.
Here is a quick presentation video on the available connectivity mentioned above for the GIGABYTE X99 series motherboards.
