Gigabyte has just announced another socket LGA2066 motherboard, the X299 Aorus Master. The “Master” brand extension is positioned below the flagship Aorus Extreme, which would make this board a successor to the X299 Aorus Gaming 7. This board gets a new design scheme that is in line with Gigabyte’s Z390 motherboard offerings. Out of the box it has support for Core X 9000-series processors.
While the board is wider than ATX, it is not quite E-ATX. It will draw power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, two 8-pin EPS, and an optional 6-pin PCIe power. It makes use of a 12 phase VRM that is cooled by a 2-stage heatsink.
As far as expansion slots go you have four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16/NC/x16/NC or x16/NC/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8). Both the memory slots and PCI-Express slots are metal reinforced. For storage there are three M.2 slots (PCIe x4), which all have integrated heatsinks, and eight SATA 6GB/s ports. USB includes four USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (2 on the rear panel, two by header).
Networking includes a 2.5G wired interface powered by the Realtek Dragon 8125AG controller, a 1G wired interface powered by the Intel i219-V controller, and 802.11ac + Bluetooth 5 interface powered by the Intel 9260 WLAN card.
Audio on this board is powered by an ESS Sabre 9218 DAC (130 dBA SNR) which drives the main front + headphones channel with a Ti Burr Brown OPA2111KP OPAMPs and WIMA capacitors. Then you have a 120 dBA SNR Realtek ALC1220VB that pulls the remaining channels.
Other features on this board include an integrated I/O cover, dual-BIOS, POST code display, USB BIOS flashback, and of course RGB lighting. Pricing is expected to be $399.