Gigabyte Adds X299 Designare EX to HEDT Motherboard Line

Gigabyte is adding a new motherboard to their X299 high-end desktop product line. This time, it is the X299 Designare EX, sporting a black and silver look with features ideal for creative professionals. It has an LGA2066 socket supporting the Intel Core X-series processor family, and it has eight DIMM slots for up to 128GB of DDR4. Since it is for productivity, more so than gaming, its feature set prioritizes connectivity rather than fancy extras. Although it is not lacking in some bonuses as well, including RGB LED support.

Gigabyte X299 Designare EX Features

What sets the Designare EX from other X299 motherboards is its dual Thunderbolt 3 support via USB Type-C. Thunderbolt 3 brings an unprecedented single-wire bandwidth of up to 40 Gb/s, which is twice that of Thunderbolt 2. Users can pretty much hook up anything through this board, and even daisy chain up to 12 Thunderbolt devices. As for regular, non-Thunderbolt 3 USB ports, four USB 3.1 Gen1 ports, with one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port are available at the back panel. Four more USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports are available via two 19-pin headers onboard.

The board also features dual Gigabit Intel LAN with cFos Speed plus dual-band Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi. This means the system built on this board is always connected online, and can manage the traffic intelligently with the cFos software.

Internally, it also has plenty of room for storage. Three M key M.2 slots are available supporting PCIe x4 VNMe SSDs. Two support up to 2280 form factors, while one supports up to 22110. Since it uses the X299 chipset, the board also readily supports Optane memory. There are also six SATA3 6Gb/s ports and two additional SATA3 6Gb/s ports via an ASMedia ASM1061 chip.

That is just the surface of course. There are a lot more features, which are outlined on the X299 Designare EX’ product page.