MSI and Gigabyte reveal Kaby Lake-X motherboards

The whole point of Kaby Lake-X still eludes us and these chips complicate matters for motherboard makers as Kaby Lake-X processors can't take advantage of all features offered by X299 motherboards. For the full feature set you need the more expensive Skylake-X processors. It's not an ideal situation and now motherboard makers are further complicating things by launching cheaper X299 motherboards that exclusively support Kaby Lake-X. It's basically one giant mess for consumers.

Photos were uploaded by VideoCardz late last week. First up is the Gigabyte X299 AORUS GAMING, this is an ATX motherboard with four DDR4 memory slots, three PCIe slots and two M.2 connectors. It's cheaper than the regular X299 motherboards but the downside is that your upgrade path is very limited. Just like the MSI board below, the X299 AORUS GAMING exclusively supports the Intel Core i7-7740X and i5-7640X. You can't use Skylake-X CPUs with these motherboards.



Next we have the MSI X299M-A Pro, this board uses the mATX form factor and is very similar to the X299 AORUS, with exception of missing PCIe x1 slots. I have to admit this X299 motherboard from MSI looks very clean, not a lot of clutter on this motherboard.