warrant its presence and
associated cost implication.
More about PCI-Express,
the Gaming G1 has metal reenforcements on either side
of the slots which supposedly
prevent any damage that may
arise due to installing heavy
and/or large graphics card.
Moreover, this re-enforcement
ensures that upon removal
of any graphics card, there’s
reduced risk of damaging the
slot. How often that happens
is anybody’s guess, but it is
a feature that is there and
at the very least works well
aesthetically.
Moving on to more
substantive features, you’ll
find that there are two M.2
connectors, each supporting
M.2 drives of up to 80mm
in length. Both of these will
have at their disposal the full
32Gbps as offered by a PCIExpress 3.0 x4 solution. These
are naturally wired to the PCH
which has copious amounts of
PCI-E segments as per Z170
standard. Not only can you use
these drives simultaneously,
they may be used in a RAID
configuration as well offering
insanely high throughput
figures and performance for
storage. Then finally as purely
a tick-box feature we have
SATA-Express support for at
least three hard drives. As I’ve
stated in previous reviews, I’ve
yet to see a SATA-Express SSD
and having spoken to some
storage vendors. It doesn’t
look as if this standard will go
anywhere at all.
That aside, you may connect
up to 10 SATA 6Gbps drives
to the motherboard, which
in total should be more
than enough for any usage
scenario. When it comes to
storage connectivity, the G1
has you covered. For those
looking at the 2.5” INTEL 750
drive for instance. GIGABYTE
includes an adapter which will
turn either one of your M.2
ports into a U.2 (SFF-8639)
Issue 36 | 2015 The OverClocker 33