Gigabyte unveils Z170X-UD5 TH Thunderbolt 3 motherboard

[HEXUS]

Claims a world's first, with the interface available over two USB Type-C connectors.

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[Brewster0101]

You forget to mention it has a PS2 port :-)

[qasdfdsaq]

Would have been nice to have at least one standard DisplayPort output...

[bert7]

THUNDERBOLT only the few will ever use it

[Lord Jago]

Thunderbolt 3 would be good for very small ITX solution cases and ofc laptops. On an ATX motherboard its a little pointless imo.

[Whiternoise]

Seems like an oddly sparse backplate for a board of this calibre, most mITX boards do better!

[cjs150]

There is a lot to like in this board. Now we need to see some Thunderbolt 3 docks versus USB3.1 equivalent hubs to decide whether it is worth bother

[D-T]

Great if you were already planning to upgrade to Skylake but I don't think the board features make up for the disappointing CPUs otherwise, still sticking with my i7 960. Shame Z170 has such an edge over X99 on the connectivity front, PCIe aside.

Think I'll be stuck with X58 in my desktop until we start seeing Kaby Lake and Cannonlake CPUs.

[kimgitz]

I have been waiting for Thunderbolt to become more mainstream with PC. For Audio and Video production, Thunderbolt is great. There are now more audio interfaces with Thunderbolt that provide great latency specs especially for monitoring while recording.

I hope to find out on the pricing and availability soon. I also understand there will be a Z170X-UD7 TH which adds to the features.

I'd be interested to see how the Intel Alpine Ridge controller for Thunderbolt 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 is integrate. I understand it uses 4 PCIe3.0 lanes and 2 of the 3 display ports from the CPU. The 3rd Display port from the CPU is used with the MegaChips MCDP2800 chip to offer HDMI 2.0. Also the M.2 feature uses 4 PCIe3.0 lanes. The CPU offers only 16 PCIe3.0 lanes. Does that mean you can only use the first PCIe3.0 expansion slot at X8 for graphics if you want to use both the Thunderbolt 3.0 ports and M.2?

[qasdfdsaq]

Great if you were already planning to upgrade to Skylake but I don't think the board features make up for the disappointing CPUs otherwise, still sticking with my i7 960. Shame Z170 has such an edge over X99 on the connectivity front, PCIe aside.

Think I'll be stuck with X58 in my desktop until we start seeing Kaby Lake and Cannonlake CPUs.

It's twice as fast as a i7 960 and at a lower power consumption, I wouldn't call that disappointing. Sure we don't get 20-50% year-on-year improvements anymore but I don't see anything better out there.

As is always the case the mainstream platform comes out first, and when X99 gets a Skylake update (X179?) it'll have the same if not better connectivity than Z170. Yeah, I'd have preferred if Skylake-E was out today but nobody was expecting that, and I'd rather have Skylake now and Skylake-E in a year than stick with my X58 for another year, given that there is now literally nothing that the Z170 doesn't do better than my X58

[D-T]

It's twice as fast as a i7 960 and at a lower power consumption, I wouldn't call that disappointing. Sure we don't get 20-50% year-on-year improvements anymore but I don't see anything better out there.

As is always the case the mainstream platform comes out first, and when X99 gets a Skylake update (X179?) it'll have the same if not better connectivity than Z170. Yeah, I'd have preferred if Skylake-E was out today but nobody was expecting that, and I'd rather have Skylake now and Skylake-E in a year than stick with my X58 for another year, given that there is now literally nothing that the Z170 doesn't do better than my X58

The i7 960 is almost 6 years old, so that's hardly surprising; when I say the new Skylake CPUs were disappointing, I mean in comparison to their immediate predecessors -- Broadwell and Haswell-E.

I can't argue, Z170 certainly offers plenty of nice features that are sorely missing on X58 (even X99) and Skylake does offer a fair performance boost when compared directly with Nehalem. I just don't feel that board/chipset features alone are enough to sell me on Skylake when it's otherwise largely unspectacular within its context; Haswell-E on X99 seems like a much more solid system, save for the unfortunate lack of connectivity I commented on earlier.

If you can afford it, I'm sure Skylake -> Skylake E would be great -- although if Skylake-E comes with a new socket as Haswell-E did, that'll be frustrating. For the moment though, I'm doubtful I'd see much practical real-world performance improvement over my 960 and the added convenience of board/chipset features aren't justification enough for me to upgrade.

... Which is why I can see myself being stuck with X58 until Kaby Lake, Cannonlake or possibly Skylake-E. I'm still happy with my CPU performance overall, so I don't feel overly compelled to fork out when faced with a minor iteration that offers ~10% greater performance over what was previously available. Not yet at least.

I'm glad GIGABYTE have done this, the board is awesome, I just wish Skylake itself felt like more of a worthwhile upgrade.