The Intel 100-series motherboard and Skylake CPUs is just around the corner, and it’s difficult to keep all this excitement under the radar. Thanks to Tomshardware for providing the exclusive first peek at high-res images of three EVGA Z170 motherboards – Z170 Stinger, the Z170 FTW and the Z170 Classified.
One of the most interesting motherboard among the three motherboards will be the Z170, which is a mini-ITX board. You’ll find an LGA 1151 socket wired to two DDR4 memory slots and a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Besides that, you will find four SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) ports, a USB 3.0 header, and two fan headers. The usual spot for M.2 will be at the back of a mini-ITX motherboard, but there is a labelled “M.2” and has a screw hole above the USB 3.0 header and it’s possible that EVGA might include a bracket tomount M.2 SSDs here.
Then, next will be mid-tier Z170 FTW from EVGA and it will feature four memory slots, along with that looks like four PCI-Express x16 slots. Don’t be mistaken, if you look closely at the text, you’ll see that only the top port is wired to 16x, with the second port wired to eight lanes, the one below to only four, and the last port to just one lane. Apart from that, there are six SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports, and a single M.2 slot that will disable two of the SATA ports. Surprisingly, EVGA includes a dedicated audio with a clear trace path to separate between the audio processor from the rest of the motherboard to protect the pure audio signal.
The top-tier motherboard is the Z170 Classified and it’s slightly bigger than a usual ATX motherboards. As the new king of the hill, it comes with a handful of features to set it apart from the crowd, including a better elaborate power delivery circuit, heat sinks with a heat-pipe connecting them, and a couple of visible features.
Furthermore, the Z170 Classified is equipped with a PLX lane-multiplier chip, which has allowed the company to wire each PCI-Express slot to a minimum of lanes, giving the board support for four-way SLI. Also, EVGA built USB 3.1 into the motherboard (including a header for front USB 3.1), as well as SATA-Express, and Creative Core3D audio. The good news is there will be an M.2 slot supporting multiple card lengths up to 42 mm (but will disable two SATA ports when in use). Thankfully, EVGA includeUSB 3.1 into the board (including a header for front USB 3.1), as well as SATA-Express, and Creative Core3D audio. There is also an M.2 one slot supporting multiple card lengths up to 42 mm (but will disable two SATA ports when in use.
EVGA is a company that always released a wonderful in performance and better-looking motherboard, but retain a very good price point.
