News - ASRock debuts 32Gb/s Ultra M.2 motherboard interface

[HEXUS]

Z97 Extreme6 motherboard is said to "blow others away" with its M.2 performance.

Read more.

[kalniel]

More like it. Detailed board review please Hexus

[scaryjim]

Presumably if they've hung it off the CPU PCIe lanes they've had to cut back somewhere else, though? According Intel's product details, the only way they can do that is breaking it down to x8,x4,x4 (and therefore presumably those lane counts are fixed per slot, and the third physical slot is v2 x4 off the chipset?)....

[kalniel]

Yep it's x8/x4/x4 instead of x8/x8. That's not cutting back unless you were hoping to run two graphics cards at x8 each.

[semo]

I still don't get why M.2 is necessary. Most modern motherboards have plenty of spare PCIe slots. Why can't we just use those?

[LSG501]

I still don't get why M.2 is necessary. Most modern motherboards have plenty of spare PCIe slots. Why can't we just use those?

laptops, mitx, matx with sli....

Personally I'd have just preferred sata 3 to have a performance upgrade but they had to go and give us a complete new socket for sata express which basically takes up 3 times the space of a sata socket as an alternative to m.2. At least with the m.2 socket you can stick it underneath the motherboard or inbetween the pcie slots.

[kalniel]

I still don't get why M.2 is necessary. Most modern motherboards have plenty of spare PCIe slots. Why can't we just use those?

As above - it's not really for desktops, which are after all a minority market now. M.2 is for the actual forms of PC that sell the most, so it's likely SSD manufacturers will target it. And given that, it's handy to have on a desktop as well. Like you, I'd still prefer PCIe, as that gives me the best flexibility (I specified my current build with PCIe SSDs in mind, even way back), but I can understand the reasoning. Sata Express however I am distinctly underwhelmed by.

[Corky34]

it's not really for desktops, which are after all a minority market now.

Desktops still make up over 70% of the market according to statcounter

[3dcandy]

But not 70% of the currently selling market....

[3dcandy]

I still don't get why M.2 is necessary. Most modern motherboards have plenty of spare PCIe slots. Why can't we just use those?

M.2 is nice though, cheaper than a normal SSD or PCIe SSD for that matter with a pretty decent transfer speed...

[semo]

M.2 is nice though, cheaper than a normal SSD or PCIe SSD for that matter with a pretty decent transfer speed...

Why would it be cheaper than a normal SSD? Also, if you want to reap the benefits of M.2, then you probably already have a PCIe SSD but in a different form factor (i.e. M.2).

Even for notebooks thought, why couldn't they just keep it PCIe? It would fit in the same slot as a WiFi card. There must be some other limitation. Time to throw away another good motherboard it seems. I'll wait for the DDR4 nonsense though. Fool me how many times?

[CK_1985]

Annoyingly, they don't seem to have included it on their mini-ITX board - which would be the most obvious place for I thought!