14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, ASRock announced that it would soon release a new series of Intel LGA 1155 motherboards with full support for the PCI Express 3.0 standard and now the first high-res pictures of these boards have made their appearance.
The new series will include the Z68 Extreme3, Z68 Extreme7, the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional, and a few other models, but all of these solutions will have the Gen 3 designation appended at the end of their name in order to differentiate themselves from the non-PCIe 3.0 compliant parts.
The three motherboards that were pictured today support two PCI Express x16 3.0 slots, which are compatible with both CrossFireX and SLI multi-GPU setups, as well as a slew of other slots and connectors.
What's important to note is that all of ASRock's boards carry such features like USB 3.0 connectivity, Power and Reset on-board buttons as well as a BIOS debug LCD.
In addition, the Z68 Extreme7 and Fatal1ty Z68 Professional also come fitted with third-party SATA controllers to increase the number of 6Gbps ports available for high-performance storage devices.
The PCI Express 3.0 standard was published in November of 2010, and it doubles the bandwidth available to devices using it, from 500MB/s per lane in each direction for PCIe Gen 2 to 1GB/s per lane in each direction.
As a result, a PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slot can provide a total bandwidth of 32GB/s, compared to the 16GB/s available to a similar Gen 2 slot.
According to VR-Zone, which cites ASRock representatives, all current 6-series motherboards should work at least in theory with PCI Express 3. The only problems should be faced when lane switching is involved as the switches used have to also be PCIe 3.0 compliant.
Right now, we don't know when ASRock starts shipping any of these Gen 3 motherboards, but a UK retailer has listed the Z68 Extreme7 at £250 (roughly $404 US). (via VR-Zone)
