ASUS Z170 Pro Motherboard Seen At Computex

The folks over at TechPowerUp managed to get some face time with the upcoming ASUS Z170 Pro motherboard. These are the first images that we have seen of ASUS’ upcoming Intel 100 series boards. At first glance we thought it was an Intel X99 board as it has the same general white and black color scheme that you normally associate with most of the ASUS X99 series boards. Now all the gold color haters won’t know what to do!

Not much is known about these LGA1151 motherboards just yet, but we know they are compatible with Intel’s next-generation Skylake processors that are also due out later this year. The big draw for this series of boards will be 6th Gen Core processor support and the fact that most support USB 3.1 technology thanks to 3rd party controllers being used on many boards. TPU reports that the ASUS Z170 Pro will be priced in the $170 to $190 range, so it will be an affordable mainstream board.

You can’t tell all the features from these two images of the ASUS Z170 Pro, but TPU says that it has a 16-phase PWM design, a new VRM heatsink design and four DDR4 memory slots for dual-channel memory kits. The Z170 Pro boasts three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, four PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and eight SATA III 6Gbps slots. We aren’t sure how the SATA Express and M.2 slots have been wired on this board, but both are present and accounted for in the image above. You also have 802.11ac WiFi Go! and dual wired Gigabit LAN ports on the board for connectivity to the internet.

The other image of the ASUS Z170 Pro motherboard shows the rear I/O configuration and we can see that there is support for all the usual devices along with two USB 3.1 ports. We were hoping that ASUS might be including USB 3.1 Type-C connectors on some of their Intel Z170 chipset based boards, but it doesn’t look like this particular board will. The good news is that ASUS sells an optional USB 3.1 Type-C add-in card for those that want to add support for that USB connector type.