Manufacturers launch X99 motherboards with DDR4

Several motherboard manufacturers have released a first look at their X99 motherboards for Intel’s upcoming Haswell E processors. The motherboards have a new lga2011 socket and ddr4 memory slots.

The motherboards are not yet ready for production, a representative of Asrock reported. In the Computex booth of that company, the manufacturer showed two X99 motherboards: the Extreme6 and Extreme4. Those boards should house Intel’s Haswell E processors, which will be released this year: the successors of the Core i7-4960X and the new most powerful consumer processors, among others. Although the new CPUs use the lga2011 socket, they are not suitable for the current lga2011 motherboards.

MSI also showed a motherboard with the renewed socket and praised the board as the world’s first ddr4 X99 motherboard. That memory is one of the main reasons why the socket cannot be used for the old Ivy Bridge E processors. The DDR4 memory needs other pins, but is still addressed as four-channel memory. The MSI board was not completely finished: for example, the I/O connectors were missing.