Product Showcase
When we place the motherboard at an angle we see the socket LGA2066. It will support both Kaby and Skylake-X procs, this is referred to as the Core X series processors. The board has a 2x 8-pin power headers available for the processor. The board has an advanced and improved power design, the regular Gaming 7 model offers 8+1 power phases, this PRO model offers a proper 12+1 phases to cope with the many-core processors and their needs in energy.
Storage ports then -- Gigabyte is equipping the board with eight SATA3 ports. There's no fuzz with weird U2 or SATA Express connectors. There is the Intel VROC Upgrade Key header available as well.
Here we see that a bit better. Just a proper eight SATA3 6Gbps ports, alongside three M2 slots that have been tucked away close to the upper PCI-Express slot and just below the chipset heatsink. See that in the photo below.
There are three M2 SSD slots available, two 8cm type (most common) 2242/2260/2280 and one 10cm type 2260/2280/22110 slot. Both support PCIe x4/x2 Gen 3.0. With two NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 connectors onboard, AORUS brings to the user PCI-Express connectivity for SSD devices. Delivering up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector, M.2 supports RAID modes.
The memory DIMM slots have been reinforced with metal shielding as well. As stated on the previous page it supports single, dual and quad channel with support up-to DDR4 4400 (O.C.) and starts at 2133 MHz memory modules. 8 x DDR4 DIMM sockets can sport up-to 128 GB of system memory.