Product Showcase

The Z270 motherboard will get you six Intel chipset based SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports. Combined in here are two M.2 PCI Express slots using x4 PCIe lanes, giving these (Optane compatible) ports not 10 GB/sec but 32 GB/sec of performance. Also two U2 slots are present. There are plenty of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available through internal motherboard connectors. USB 3.1 Gen 2 would be the new and proper 10 Gbps connectors. This motherboard has all gen 2 connectors and thus you get full speed.
 

Here we can see the four DIMM slots which offer support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to 2400 MHz is specified (OC). If you activate the XMP 2.0 profile in the BIOS, your memory should be automatically configured for you at its maximum clock speed and recommended voltage. You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. Again, XMP 2.0 must be supported, we'll show you this setup running at 2133 MHz later on in the article.

Yep, you may unleash some more power with graphics configurations. Support for up to 3 full length discrete VGA cards. Mind you, we can only recommend you to go with 2x multi-GPU. Three cards would bog down the 3rd card at a x4 link where two cards would both get x8 Gen 3.0 PCIe links. To the far left you can see 'Audio Boost', underneath is a Realtek ALC 1150 codec housed for your audio. 
 

 
Above a photo of the upper M2 slot, up-to the longest form factor 22110 is supported. The photo below shows the lower slot, similar in specs. Obviously these are both PCIe 3.0 x4 and support NVMe and Optane as well.