ASRock certainly is ballsy, they figured they could show one X299 motherboard, but no, below the fold photos of the ASRockX299 Gaming K6, X299 FormulaÂ*OC, X299-E ITX/AC, X299 Killer SLI/AC, X299 Prof... Computex 2017 Scoop: ASRock X299 Motherboard Galore
That E-ITX mainboard's a little weird... what RAM does that thing use? The same as laptops (can't recall the technical name they're called by sry)?
Is there a reason for more than 3 PCI-E lanes? I mean i see 4 to 5 slots here and SLI has been cut down to just 2 cards in this current gen. Seems like overkill and a waste of money to me unless you have like 4 RX 480's already or you have more than 3 last gen AMD/Nvidia cards laying around what's the point really? That ITX board is nice though, I'm a one graphics card gamer now, that sli and crossfire hype broke my bank back in the day when i first started building PC's. Now i just like it simple, small powerful motherboard, powerful cpu and one PCI-E slot preferably or 2 at the most.
I guess it's a bit of a relict of old days, yes. But on the other hand, 2 GPUs and 2 NVMe SSDs are probably going to be somewhat a thing in the future, not sure though.
There are reasons to have more than 2 GPUs other than gaming, such as 3D rendering, compute workloads like transcoding, or video editing/processing. So while you don't put more than 2 in SLI/CF, there's a reason to want 3 or 4 cards if you have the right workload. There's also the fact that you can use the extra slots for other high bandwidth uses - MSI is including an x8 card that has two m.2 PCIe slots on it (for a total of 5 slots on the board it's bundled with), and you could theoretically put four of them in a full x16 slot; heck, it probably already exists for the server market. It would cost an arm or a leg, but you could populate your PC 10+ TB of NVMe SSDs, without any bandwidth constraints like you hit on z270 with anything over one stick. Slap them into RAID 0 or even RAID10 alongside the ~100GB RAM cache you can make with the 128GB you can populate on the board and have basically zero disk wait time to load anything, ever.
