This week I attended an event where Gigabyte was showing off their brand new Intel Z790 “X” motherboards. These motherboards are of course made for next-generation Intel processors and are packed with new features. Gigabyte’s tag-line for these new boards is “Speed Simplified” and we are going to go over some of the main reasons why that really reigns true with this generation of motherboards.
Gigabyte DDR5 XMP Booster
The first thing is the new DDR5 XMP booster. With the upcoming Intel processors you are going to see a better performing memory controller. On top of that Gigabyte has improved their memory layout and motherboard PCBs. This means you are going to be able to unlock some serious DDR5 speeds! Gigabyte’s DDR5 XMP Booster will give you pre-defined profiles based on the memory IC and PMIC vendor analysis.
At the event they showed up a system running DDR5 at 8266 MHz, which is just insane! And again the process to getting memory up to this speed is as simple as applying the profile in the BIOS!
Gigabyte EZ-Latch Click & EZ-Latch Plus
One of my favorite things about these new boards from Gigabyte is the EZ-Latch Click and EZ-Latch Plus systems for both the M.2 slots as well as your PCI-Express slots. The M.2 implementation will make installing M.2 drives so easy. Like most Gigabyte boards the bottom of these new boards are covered with heatsinks. Previously removing these heatsinks would mean removing a handful of small screws. Now you just have this metal tool-less locking system that allows you to click these heatsinks into place.
If the heatsinks happen to have RGB lighting on them Gigabyte has cleverly uses pogo-style connections so there are no wires to worry about!
The M.2 slots themselves also have a tool-less system for installing your drives. Now if your board comes with a larger M.2 heatsink for the main PCI-Express 5.0 slot it will also have a metal tool-less locking system.
Certain boards in this new generation will have a physical button towards the front edge of the board that will release your graphics card. Gigabyte is calling this PCIe EZ-Latch Plus and of course makes removing a graphics card extremely easy.
Boards that don’t have EZ-Latch Plus will have a small tab that sits above your normal PCIe release latch. This tab is easier to access than the normal release latch and will be out of the way of the large M.2 heatsinks on the board. Gigabyte is calling this PCIe EZ-Latch.
Fast Connectivity
We are once again going to get an upgrade on connectivity with the Wireless boards in this lineup. You are going to see WiFi 7 here and this means up to 5.8 GB/s speeds and multi-link operation. Gigabyte is also shipping a new ultra-high gain antenna with select models.
Check out page 2 for an overview of the new boards!
