Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we just recently towards cyber powers offices in california where the company had a few z 170 motherboards on display so these are skylake motherboards with the newsie 170 chipset and that will effectively be replacing the z97 line and everything that came before that it is not an x 99 replacement the Z 170 chipset can tactically support ddr3 and the ddr4 but all the boards we looked at while there where ddr4 really not surprisingly and all we're doing here is showing off a few of those motherboards there are three that we saw in person and I should quickly note that none of these were necessarily finalized models so they may change before publication or production rather in the August timeframe for Sky lake s but the asrock boards were fairly feature complete and we saw the gaming case 6 and gaming k4 from has rock and then the gigabyte Gaz 17 th d3 which is a lower end entry level board so the game k-6 is something that we don't have a price for yet and that's true for all three of these boards I would imagine this will be in the probably middle 100's upper 100's range because it is a pretty feature complete board it has 12 or 14 phases on the vrm not a hundred percent clear on that but quite a few phase is more than enough for sky like overclocking it's got three PCI Express x1 slots by one and then it has three pcie 3.0 slots one hardwired for by 16 and the other two are by eight and by 4 or x 18 x 4 however you want to say that SLI and crossfire are both listed as supported on the k-6 and it's also got an ultra MDOT to slide 32 gigabits per second consuming for PCIe three-point line and that rest below the first primary pci express slot the k-6 board is definitely a mid-range to upper mid-range board for Sky lake it's got a couple of SATA Express ports on it and then the usual state of three options as well for troubleshooting and diagnostics the bore it has two BIOS chips which are toggleable so if you break one chip when updating you can toggle to the other one and it'll still be usable and then there's a seven segment display that lives near the bottom of the board and that's really just used for troubleshooting error codes things like that and then you've got the somewhat standard now overclocking and power buttons up near the dimm slots so that is the gaming case 6 from asrock it is a fatality board as rocks fatality gaming k4 is a lower to your board I would imagine this will probably be closer to the 100 dollar price point but again we don't have prices yet that's just speculation based on feature set and it looks like the k4 has the same black and red aesthetic as the k-6 it's got the same IO cover on it with the asrock gaming logo and then it has the purity sound 3 cover as well which the k-6 also had the k4 has a slimmer vrm voltage regulator module it looks like it's about 10 phases for the cpu and it's got a single pcie slot wired for by 16 with one more four by four usage so not really great or even usable for multi video card support and then it's got three pcie x 1 slots if you want to do audio cards or capture cards things like that there is a 4-pin molex header sitting above the pcie x 11 slot for additional power I'm currently unclear on whether that is for GPU or cpu overclocking but it is probably and almost definitely for one of those based on the history of 4-pin molex connectors on motherboards and then it's also got an empty slot just like the case 6 does but it is unlabeled and unbranded on the board which means that we're really unclear right now and whether this will remain in the final production model or if it's just something that was on there for the prototype dummy but it is there in the board that we saw so it's possible that it'll make it to the final production model the k4 then the usual say to express state of three ports and two more say to three ports near the chipset heatsink and the dims so it's got a couple of those but not as fully loaded it still has two BIOS chips BIOS a1 and b1 which are nice to have in the event of a BIOS failure the final motherboard is gigabytes gaz 17 th d3 this board is the most prototype looking board that we saw so it is very likely that this is incomplete and not representative of the final model as evidenced in part by some of the striped marks on the PCB but we can learn the basics from it and this hd3 has just two pcie 3.0 slots one is wired for by 16 one is wired for what looks like by four and then it's got two pcie x 1 slots and two pci slots not express for whatever reason i can't really think of a reason you had to use those anymore but they are on there there's also some cereal and ports like that as well so it's definitely got some support for what would be the asia or business markets where they still some use some of those legacy technologies there is an m2 ultra 32 gigabits per second port between the pci-e and the cpu slot and then it's got a black and gold vrm heatsink north of the cpu it is currently unclear if there will be more heat sinks or shields on the board it could be dressed up a little bit before launch we're really not sure yet we'll find out when the product comes out and is a officially showcased in less than a month here the vrm looks about six phases on this board as is and that's it for this quick motherboard roundup we saw these at the cyberpower offices and we're expecting skylake very shortly we actually have test samples in hand and as soon as embargo is lifted we'll have a review on intel sky lake and all the supporting technologies ddr4 motherboards things like that so be sure to subscribe to the channel if you want to stay up to date on this content and then check out our patreon page if you're a fan of our in the field work and journalism on hardware it definitely helps us out to look into our patreon page and I will see you all next time