Intel Skylake Z170 Motherboards: A Quick Look at 55+ New Products

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• utmode - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Why so many sata express in so many motherboard?

• Dahak - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Yeah, I dont get that either, it does not seem like anyone is doing sata express drives, when NVMe is about to come out. Although its only wasting board space as the SateExpress port can double as 2xSATA ports. I was kinda hoping they would have dropped it for this. Maybe on the other chipsets?

• Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  I think the reason lies in the marketing departments wanting to tick a box in the marketing materials. When one manufacturer includes it, everyone follows the suit so their products won't look "inferior" compared to competitors'. It's no secret that SATA Express is practically dead (although I would say it's a miscarriage), but to those with less technical knowledge it may sound cool and better than regular SATA, even though they will end up using SATAe as regular SATA.

• Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  ASRock have their USB 3.1 front panel which uses SATA Express, so there's finally some use for it.

• silenceisgolden - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  It would work better for marketing departments if they market that they "did not bother with the useless standard, SATA Express".

• DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  The design cycle for these boards probably started a good year ago. By the time it became clear that Sata-Express was a dead standard it was too late to make any major design changes for the initial wave of boards.

• Slash3 - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link

  As someone with 10 SATA devices, I very much appreciate I/O overkill. :)

• phorgan1 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link

  You can get more sata in less lanes. Once you use up lanes for nvme drives and graphics cards, the smaller groupings won't support more cards or nvme drives (cards need x8 or x16 and nvme drives need x4) the left overs will support usb and sata. Since sata is such lower bandwidth you can still fit a lot of sata in around the fringes, so why not? A sata ssd is still pretty fast.

• prophet001 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Why no slot for M.2 drives?

• prophet001 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link

  Nevermind. Hadn't fully read the article.