ASRock Z270 Fatal1ty Motherboard Pictured

Kaby Lake and Intel’s 7th generation Core processors are set to launch early next year and as the time draws closer, we see more and more leaks in that regard. This time it is ASRock’s Z270 Fatal1ty motherboard that got teased online via a Spanish tech sites facebook page. The images naturally don’t reveal anything in regards to the performance of the new platform, but it does show a bit of what we can expect from Intel’s next generation of hardware.

As a Fatal1ty board, this Z270 naturally comes in a black and red colour scheme and features quality components such as Nichicon 12K Black Caps and quality sound options with DTS.

The onboard sound comes from a Sound Blaster Cinema 3 which should deliver great audio for both games and movies. We also see the PCIe x16 slots with extra shielding and several PCIe x1 slots for more add-in cards that don’t require the same amount of bandwidth as PCIe storage and graphics cards.

While PCIe storage is the next thing, legacy SATA storage is important too and the Fatal1ty Z280 features eight SATA3 ports for plenty of storage drives. It’s also interesting to see that the trend with SATA-Express connectors has passed as they aren’t present. With the addition of M.2 and PCIe storage, we simply don’t need that on consumer-class boards anymore.

The last thing teased is the rear IO panel that comes with some given parts and a few surprises. There are two Ethernet ports, most likely Gigabit speeds, and four USB 3.0 ports (blue) and a USB 3.1 port (light blue) as well as a USB Type-C port. There’s still a legacy combo PS2 port for keyboard and mouse and all the way to the left, we see mounting holes for wireless antennas which point towards onboard wireless networking. The display area holds the biggest surprise as there is a D-Sub VGA connector next to the DVI and HDMI ports. After all, the VGA port isn’t natively supported since the 6th generation processors.

I’m already excited for the new Intel generation and I’m looking forward to a lot more teasers, leaks, and benchmarks once it’s officially released. Will you be upgrading to Intel’s latest generation next year or are you happy with what you got now? Let us know in the comments.