ASUS TUF X299 Mark 1 review - Product Showcase

 
When we place the motherboard at an angle we see that all new socket LGA2066. It will support both Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X processors, these are referred to as the Core X series processors. The cooler mounting system is the same as on X99, meaning you can re-use your cooler and are not forced to purchase a new socket mounting system or complete cooling kit.

 
Storage ports then -- ASUS has fitted the board with 8x SATA3 ports. There is no U2 / SATA Express connector, real-estate that nobody is going to use either really. So we're cool with that.
 

 
Here we see that a bit better. A good eight SATA3 6Gbps ports, alongside two M.2 slots that have been tucked away close to the left of the chipset cooler (with an active fan I should add) one M.2 is hidden, the other vertically mounted.

 
With two NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 connectors onboard, delivering up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector, the dual M.2 setup supports RAID modes. 
 

 
Close to the bottom there is a second M.2 slot, which unfortunately needs to be vertically mounted. An extra mounting bracket kit is included so it doesn't hang there as vulnerable as it really is.