The Board - Layout

We've seen styling as on the Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming before in earlier Gaming products from Gigabyte. The board itself is primarily black, with red and white added via plastic covers and the PCH heatsink. The rear of the board is all black, with little of interest to be found. As always, be careful not to scratch the back of the board when installing the Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming.


The socket area is closely flanked by cooling and the eight DIMM slots. Flipping open the socket cover reveals a socket with all its pins present and what was referred to as an "OC Socket" by some of the early X99 Express board releases. It means there are some additional pins here that can aid in overclocking the CPU in some instances.


There are two banks of four DIMM slots on either side of the socket, which results in 128 GB of "standard" memory support and support for up to 256 GB with registered DIMMs. 32 GB of memory in a single stick still seems a bit crazy to me, but it is clearly possible these days.


There are four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, each of which is specially reinforced, and a PCIe X1 slot. There are two M.2 slots between the PCIe slots; one for a SATA- or PCIe-based drive and the other for a Wi-Fi module.


The rear I/O panel is pretty simple; there are six USB 3.0 ports (one is used for BIOS updating), and two USB 3.1 ports, one Type-A (red) and one Type-C. There are dual LAN ports as well as a bracket to add a Wi-Fi antennae should you use the M.2 Wi-Fi port. Audio plugs and a PS/2 port fill out the rest of the plugs the rear I/O offers. SATA connectivity features eight standard SATA 6 Gb/s ports, with another two tied into a SATA Express port. There is also a U.2 plug for drives that require it.


The bottom edge of the board has a set of fairly standard pin headers, although a MOLEX power plug for added PCIe power is present, as is an additional USB 3.0 front-panel header. The Clear CMOS header is also here, at the Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming's bottom edge.