At its PAX East booth, GIGABYTE showed off three of its upcoming socket LGA2011v3 motherboards, which it plans to launch alongside Intel's Core i7 "Broadwell-E" processors. The three include the X99-Designare EX, the X99 Phoenix SLI G1, and the X99 Ultra Gaming (pictured in that order). The running theme on these boards, apart from their design-language that's similar to GIGABYTE's Z170-series motherboards, is 32 Gb/s M.2 slots, even U.2 slots in some cases, reinforced PCIe - and in some cases even memory - slots, and USB 3.1, besides out of the box support for the latest CPUs.

The X99-Designare EX features five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, from which three can function at x16 speed and two U.2 ports. GIGABYTE is probably betting on NVMe SSDs with U.2 connectors heavily. The X99 Phoenix SLI G1 appears to be a slightly more toned down board in terms of features. It features just four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, wireless networking, and just one U.2 connector. Unlike the Designare, which is slotted in the company's mainline Ultra Durable lineup, this board is the company's new G1 Gaming offering for this platform. Then there's the X99 Ultra Gaming. This board is based on the same PCB as the X99 Phoenix SLI G1, lacks wireless networking, but features reinforced memory slots. The three boards could launch alongside Intel's new CPUs.