Gigabyte Introduces X299X Motherboards for Cascade Lake-X

Gigabyte comes with three motherboards for the Cascade Lake-X CPUs from Intel. The boards feature an ‘upgraded’ X299 chipset and feature a sixteen-phase power design. Prices and availability of the products have not yet been announced.

The trio of motherboards are released under the X299X name. These are the X299X Designare 10G, Aorus Master and Aorus Xtreme Waterforce. The X299X naming doesn’t mean the motherboards include a new chipset; they use the X299 chipset that came out in 2017. Gigabyte does indicate that the X299 chipset has been upgraded, but does not indicate exactly what the updates entail.

Gigabyte’s X299X lineup is made for Intel’s upcoming Cascade Lake-X processors. These CPUs have four extra PCI-e lanes compared to their predecessors. Also new is support for Wi-Fi 6 and 2.5Gbit Ethernet controllers. The processors use the same lga2066 socket as their predecessors.

The motherboards all have a new power design with sixteen phases, which according to Gigabyte each have a theoretical capacity of up to seventy amps. The boards support a maximum of 256GB of RAM divided over eight dimm slots. The Aorus Xtreme Waterforce has an integrated water block that cools the CPU, VRMs, chipset and M2 SSDs.

The three boards have been validated for use with Nvidia Quadro GPUs. The motherboards all offer three m2 slots with four PCI-e lanes, with the Aorus Xtreme Waterforce and Designare including an Aorus Gen 4 AIC Adaptor, which is a plug-in card that can accommodate up to four PCI-e 4.0 SSDs. The Designare 10G also includes an Intel X550-AT2 network controller with two 10Gbit Ethernet ports.

Gigabyte has not yet disclosed what the new motherboards will cost. It is not yet known when the X299X series will be released. Gigabyte does say that the three motherboards will be available ‘soon’. The Cascade Lake-X processors are expected in November, so presumably the motherboards will also appear around that time.