Gigabyte Announces C230 Series Motherboards for Skylake Xeons

Hardware manufacturer Gigabyte has presented its first series of Skylake Xeon motherboards with the Intel C230 chipset. The motherboards for the E3-1200 v5 processors come in atx and mini-itx formats for workstations and servers.

Among the four new models are two motherboards for workstations and two for servers. The boards take advantage of the various new capabilities introduced with the Skylake platform. With DDR4 memory, up to 64GB of RAM can now be addressed at 2133MHz. The maximum number of pcie lanes goes from 8 to 20.

The two workstation motherboards listen to the serial numbers MW31-SP0 and MW21-SE0. The MW31 is an ATX motherboard with space for a special expansion slot with four PCIe lanes that lies between the CPU and the I/O ports on the back. For example, the card slot can be used for an accessory that adds an extra Thunderbolt port. Furthermore, the top model can handle accelerator cards, such as Intel’s Xeon Phi, Nvidia’s Tesla and AMD’s FirePro or with a dual GPU setup for Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFire. The MW21-SE0 is a micro-ATX board with a network connection as standard, six SATA-600 connections and only an onboard VGA connection as standard.

The server boards MX11-PC0 and MX31-BS0 come in mini-itx and micro-atx format. The MX11 has two Intel I210 network connections and a VGA connection. Furthermore, there is room for two memory modules and storage with an NVME interface can be connected via a mini-sas connection. The MX31 also has 2 I210 network connections and a VGA connection. The board has space for four memory modules and can therefore control a maximum of 64GB DDR4 memory. For storage memory, among other things, an M.2 slot and six SATA-600 ports can be used.

MW31-SP0, MW21-SE0, MX11-PC0, MX-BS0