Sneakpeak into the Upcoming Gigabyte Z170 Chipset Motherboards

We're all anxiously awaiting the arrival of Intel's Skylake-S processors, which are rumored to debut on August 5, 2015, at Gamescom. In the meantime, we're left to speculate about speeds and features, and drool over pictures of motherboards that will support the batch of CPUs from Intel.

What, you're lacking a photo collection of Z170-based motherboards to stare at? Not anymore! Gigabyte bombarded the web with several pictures of a few of its upcoming Z170-chiset boards, including the GA-Z170X Gaming G1 (shown above) and GA-Z170X Gaming 7 (shown below), arguably the two hottest boards of the bunch.

All of the Z170 boards Gigabyte showed off will feature Intel's LGA 1151 socket, as it's the only one that will support Skylake. According to sources Gigabyte's flagship GA-Z170X Gaming G1 will also sport a 22-phase power design, water cooling-ready VRM heatsink, dual M.2 ports, dual SATA Express ports, dual internal USB 3.0 headers, dual GbE LAN ports, high end audio, and a new Turbo B-Block chip (allows for a greater range of BLCK adjustments going from 90MHz to 200MHz).

The Gaming 7 board looks similar to the Gaming 1, though it loses some of the advanced features, such as a 4th PCI-E slot and VRMs that can be water cooled.

Gigabyte is known for putting out colorful boards, though it appears to be moving away from pastel color schemes with Z170, at least for the initial batch. The company's mid-range offerings scale back the use of white, which is limited to well-placed accents

The GA-Z170X Gaming 5's socket is powered by a 12 phase digital power design. Like its higher end brethren, it has four DDR4 memory slots. It also has three PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots with metal shielding and a fourth PCI-E 3.0 x1 slot. Other features include two M.2 ports, six SATA 6Gbps ports, two SATA Express ports, two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 front panel headers, dual LAN ports, and 7.1 channel audio.

Gigabyte didn't say how much it new boards will cost, though with Skylake-S barely four weeks away, we won't have to wait long to find out.