ASUS has unveiled it's new X299 Motherboard for it's Strix Series of Motherboard and it looks nothing short of amazing. The new X299 incorporates Intel's new LGA 2066 Skylake X CPUs and upcoming Kaby Lake CPUs for it's HEDT Platform.
The board isn't short of features and holds nothing back on what it could do, granted with that said this is most likely a top of the line board and won't be selling cheap. The board has 8 DIMM slots, 3 PCI-E 16x Slots with what looks like metal re-enforcements for the slots itself to maintain heavier GPUs that could break regular plastic PCI-E slots over-time. The theme overall looks like either a Matte / Metallic coating of paint which maintains ASUS's past ROG boards that basically have been matte for at least the past 3 years that I know following the series itself.
There's a NVME M.2 SSD slot that is protected by a thermal plate which helps keep the SSD itself cool so it doesn't overhead or throttle over-time, The only question is whether it's a 4x or 8x slot that this slot supports. A M.2 4x slot would hold M.2. SSDs that run at faster speeds back like the Kingston Predator SSD and only be able to at the most show read/write speeds between 500 MB/s and 600 MB/s rather than the 1400 MB/s that it's meant to run. I assume that the x4 issue that we saw with the Z97 series is hopefully solved with the extra pci-e lanes on the X299 series.
The board also has 8 SATA III 6GB/s slots for those that want to run extra drives in RAID mode or simply add more storage in the future and it has 3 USB 3.0 front panel slots to power any extra USB slots on the front panel of your case and a second M.2. slot for an extra M.2. SSD if you so desire.
The heatsink has RGB lighting as well as the PCI-E slots. It has a Gamefirst IV Ethernet port, 7.1. channel audio jacks, A 2x2 MIMO Wi-fi Port, A Bio Flashback switch, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports and 2 USB 3.1 ports (1 type-A, 1 type-C). The on-board audio does use a S1220A Codec with Sonic Studio for pinpointing gunshots and other things but if you're really looking for top-notch sound quality then Dedicated Sound Card such as a Sound Blaster Z is really needed especially if you have a really good pair of audiophile headphones or a home theater system that you use otherwise you're doing yourself a dis-service and not getting the most out of your sound equipment using on-board audio.
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