Gigabyte X99, Z97 and H97 motherboards to support new Intel 750 Series PCIe NVMe SSDs
Gigabyte has announced that its X99, Z97 and H97 motherboard line-ups will now feature support for the NVMe storage protocol and Intel's recently-announced 750 Series PCIe SSDs. NVMe offers improved performance and lower latencies over the older AHCI protocol, and will allow consumers to take advantage of the full potential of PCIe SSDs.
The Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 is one of the boards that are already compatible with the new Intel 750 PCIe SSDs.
Following up on Intel’s release of the PCIe-based 750 Series that utilize the NVM Express (NVMe) storage protocol, Gigabyte has now announced that its complete line-up of X99, Z97 and H97 motherboards will be compatible with the new SSDs.
This means that Gigabyte will join MSI in providing support for NVMe protocol, which replaces the aging Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) – originally designed for mechanical hard drives – and improves performance of PCIe-based SSDs by lowering latency.
Gigabyte X99 boards are already compatible with the new Intel 750 Series PCIe SSDs, but Z97 and H97 motherboards will require BIOS updates that are already available for download on Gigabyte’s website. Alternatively, users can update their board BIOS via the @BIOS utility available in Gigabyte’s App Center.
The Intel 750 Series PCIe SSDs are targeted at the PC enthusiasts and workstation markets, making them the first such drives from Intel to be available to general consumers. Previously, Intel PCIe-based SSDs were limited to enterprise applications with the Intel Solid State Drive Data Center P3700 series. Gigabyte’s support for NVMe thus enables more consumers to make use of the performance improvements of the new Intel SSDs, which are touted to be up to 4x faster than SATA-based SSDs.
And when we consider the fact that Gigabyte recently passed ASUS as the leading motherboard vendor according to preliminary shipping figures and that even mainstream H97 boards will support NVMe, we can't help but think that this heralds good things for PCIe-based SSDs geared toward the mainstream market.
For a full list of boards from Gigabyte that will support NVMe, please refer here.
Source: Gigabyte
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