No explanation there why Asus chose U.2 instead of M.2, other than "M.2 dumps heat onto the motherboard PCB".
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M2 and U2 are vastly different connectors. U.2 is a replacement for SATA of sorts that will allow 2.5" SSDs to get much higher performance, while M.2 is a replacement for mPCIe and mSATA and is designed for components mounted on the board directly.
That means the Maximus VIII Impact doesn't have any support for board-mounted drives at all. None. There's currently no way of mounting the drive you want to use on this board, you'd have to use an off-board adapter.
No explanation there why Asus chose U.2 instead of M.2, other than "M.2 dumps heat onto the motherboard PCB".
I'm fairly sure Asus wasn't worried about a 5-7W component considering this is an extreme OC board.
It's obvious their board is filled to the brim, considering the socket, keep-out area and PCIe traces needed, along with a possible switch for the U.2 port. It seems Asus didn't want to cut the PCIe x16 port again to x8, probably due to the marketing department claiming customers don't know it doesn't matter. And they probably figured U.2 is the more future-proof port for max speed since M.2 will most likely be thermally or power limited.
Is it justified ? Maybe, they were the first to release a consumer mITX board with M.2 with PCIe 3.0 x4 and NVMe support if I'm correct. Now with the Samsung 950 Pro a year later, it's the fastest consumer SSD you can install. Next year it might be a U.2 drive that will fit this new board.
Asus JJ talks about the Impact VIII board here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKqybmuZK4I
Yeah hopefully! I wonder why they haven't done this for the mITX board yet given that the Thunderbolt 3 chip is on board?
... I would have ranked the Asrock closer to the Impact than the Pro Gamer
I was pretty much ok with the Asrock if the Asus Pro Gamer wasn't available, but I had a few conciderations that the Asus board would address with some things I would like to do with this build, one of them being Asus' Wifi Go.
I haven't seen anything online yet that indicates any performance difference between the AsRock and the Asus. Having 3 fan headers (minimum) was an absolute requirement, and both Asus boards and the Asrock meet that. As far as I have been able to see, the only thing I have sacrificed is the USB C connector, and that isn't important to me at this point in time. Maybe in another year or so
By the way, does the Asus Pro Gaming come with USB 3.1 gen2? Deciding between this Asus or MSI, which seems pretty similar spec wise and is a bit cheaper.
By the way, does the Asus Pro Gaming come with USB 3.1 gen2? Deciding between this Asus or MSI, which seems pretty similar spec wise and is a bit cheaper.
It has two Type-A ports.
I made a spreadsheet of the different Z170 boards comparing all the specs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1saNUPX6ycN20R1Yu_lNDPpowTfVwmrQiwHYVNAoZenw/edit#gid=0
Because the boards are all different, they probably want to do it on the high-tier boards first, as those boards are sold to the customers with the most money.
The more interesting question perhaps would by why they didn't put it on their boards initially? Maybe there was some software problem they couldn't fix, maybe intel wasn't able to certify their boards in time?
I'm fairly certain that this will be rolled out to the mITX board as well, it has the same controller chip after all.
The B150 chipset has only 8 PCIe lanes available vs.16 for the H170 and 20 for the Z170. The B150 also lacks RST support, so no RAID.What I don't get is what's the difference between that and the H170N wi-fi from gigabyte?.
According to this all the other Gigabyte motherboards will be able to support thunderbolt 3, except for the itx one.
http://www.techpowerup.com/217023/gigabyte-offers-thunderbolt-3-support-on-select-boards-with-a-firmware-update.html
Grrr... I just want a Thunderbolt 3 mitx board with m.2 2280 support, how hard can it be?
It's out, from Gigabyte
Which one? It looks like the GA-Z170X-Gaming G1, GT and 7 now have thunderbolt 3 but all are much bigger than ITX. The GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 seems like it MIGHT have Alpine Ridge but no support for Thunderbolt 3 that I can see.
In the press release it says " has expanded with the certification by Intel of the GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming G1". So perhaps Gigabyte need to get the Gaming 5 through the certification process before saying anything.
Wishful thinking. Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 looks like a nice board, but Gigabyte has said in the past that this board will not support TB3.
Here's a new French review of the ASRock z170 Gaming ITX:
www.59hardware.net