Traditionally Gigabyte is known as one of the go to gaming and overclocking board manufacturers. In fact their entire Z170 launch was focused entirely on the G1 Gaming line. As we know and expect there are always more boards to come in a second launch wave a few months or so after every new chipset launch. In this case we are getting a whole set of workstation motherboards from Gigabyte.
Featuring a desert camouflage theme these ws boards are aimed towards the cost sensitive professional who still needs a good set of features.
These boards feature the brand new X170 and X150 chipsets. The biggest benefit of these chipsets is their compatibility with the Skylake Xeon processors. Of course they are also DDR4 motherboards and this typically means expensive mainstream DDR4 memory. Fortunately being Xeon equipped they also support ECC memory which is server grade memory and can be found for much cheaper. One final feature worth mentioning is the USB 3.1 port equipped with type-C connector compatibility and that means the latest Thunderbolt protocols are supported as well.
Gigabyte brought six variants of the new WS boards to CES they are as follows:
GA-X170-Extreme ECC
GA-X170-Gaming 3 WS
GA-X150-Plus WS
GA-X150M-Pro ECC
GA-X150M-Plus WS
Being workstation boards you should expect that they don’t have any on board graphics capabilities. The workstation series is expected to be available sometime in the first quarter of 2016.
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