Product Showcase
When we place the motherboard at an angle we see the rather familiar socket LGA1151. It will support Coffee Lake procs, this is referred to as the 8th generation Core series processors. The board has an 8-pin power header for the processor, which is plenty for even a very decent overclock.
Storage ports then -- Gigabyte is equipping the board with four SATA3 ports (all facing upwards due to form factor). There are no U2 or SATA Express connectors. There is, however, a proper M2 slot.
Here we see that a bit better. A proper four SATA3 6Gbps ports (proper as in good for Mini ITX), and the M2 slot that has been tucked away close to upper PCI-Express slots. See that in the photo below.
The M.2. slot is an 8cm type 2242/2260/2280 slot. It supports PCIe x4/x2 Gen 3.0. With an NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 connector onboard it can deliver up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed. Interestingly enough, on the backside of the PCB you will find another M2 slot, 8CM. So you can fit two NVMe M2 units on this small motherboard. Very clever!
Super fast M.2. SSDs can get quite hot and when they do, they can throttle down. Gigabyte applies a seriously proper heatsink solution for this. Very nice. Again, a second slot is located at the backside of the PCB.