Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming 3 preview

We preview the Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 which is intended for the first wave of Intel's Skylake-X processors that will be released next week. Based on Socket LGA2066 however the motherboard also supports Kaby Lake X procs in the form of the quad-core Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K. While the processors are still pending for arrival here at the website, we are able to give you a closer look at the motherboard itself. Have a peek at what is about to launch soon.

This year is one of the more weird releases in relation to Intel. Here in the EU Intel has killed 99% of the marketing, press and PR activities. Hence the majority of media all over Europe is not receiving any information from Intel anymore. That said, Intel does not seed processor samples for review anymore. Hence the reviews this week are based on a handful cherry-picked websites that are on a marketing-drip directly from Intel. The rest of the media will need to somehow borrow their samples from Intel partners. It’s a big mess with everything and anything Intel alright when it comes to media related matters. It is all quite confusing really.

That means we need to borrow our samples from partners, and yes .. they all do not have enough samples to rotate, if they have processors at hand they can borrow at all. It is what it is, for now this article is a preview of the motherboard, we'll explain some detail on X299 and the processors. And once we get our hands on a Kaby Lake X or Skylake X processor, we'll continue with a full review.

Intel’s primary processor business has been releasing and refreshing quad-core processors for years now with an E type (e.g. Broadwell-E / Haswell-E) processor release every now and then. They had no rush and have been competitive and relaxed all the way for years now. Zen or Ryzen Intel did anticipate, but the the AMD consumer aimed Threadripper 16-core and Naples sever segment 32-core made Intel step up its game a notch. Initially it was expected that Intel would announce a new 10 and maybe 12-core processor based on Skylake-X architecture. With everything that has been going on, there now has been a number of announcements going from top to bottom with an unexpected quad-core Kaby-Lake-X release as well as announcements that entails Intel to release 18-core processors. There’s more to it than that as Intel might simply be trying to steal some of the Threadripper momentum. First the Skylake-X processors are going to be released. But you will not see any availability for the 18, 16 and 14-core parts soon. Skylake-X will release up-to 10-cores (only). It is rumored that in August we’ll see the 12-core higher-specced parts, but there even is a rumor that the 18-core 2000 USD flagship SKU might be released in october, but might not see enough volume retail availability until 2018. And sure you will see some reviews on that part this year, but showing a working processor and retail availability, well these are two very different things.

The Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 we'll preview today is the more affordable segmented product and certainly is a good decent motherboard alright. On the next page a word on the processors and architecture, after which we'll dive into a full photo-shoot with the Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3.