Roughly speaking, the launch of the next Intel processors, the Alder Lake-S, is next month. And one month before the launch, we can already see a Z690 motherboard appearing. The model in question is signed by Gigabyte, whose Aorus Z690 Elite AX DDR4 datasheet can be found online!
Aorus Z690 Elite AX DDR4: a PCIe 5.0 version but with DDR4?
With this leak, we have a glimpse of the design chosen by Gigabyte for its motherboard. In the main, it remains sober and we find large heatsinks on the board. As for the VRMs, they benefit from two massive aluminum blocks that will have to cool the 16 + 1 + 2 phases of the board.
As you can see, the brand is pushing PCIe to the 5.0 standard, via a PCIe x16. However, keep in mind that this standard will remain dormant until we have components capable of using it.
For storage, the brand highlights a total of four M.2 slots for SSDs in PCIe. However, we should also have some SATA in stock just in case.
We’ll quickly finish by telling you about the RAM, which, as the name of the board suggests, is DDR4. The aim would be to offer a “budget” motherboard (prices remain to be seen, as usual) compatible with the current standard. As a reminder, this was also done at the launch of DDR4. Some Skylake motherboards could handle DDR3L.