First Intel X299 Skylake-X Motherboards Pictured

For once there can be little denying that a leaked image is going to be pretty close to the finished article: behold the first high-end motherboard we've seen with its box for Intel's X299 high-end desktop platform. The new X299 chipset as well as Skylake-X CPUs are slated to launch in June with up to six new CPUs from four-cores up to 12 cores in the new range set to battle AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs.

Part of Gigabyte's familiar Aorus range, the new Gaming 9 sports some interesting features. It's fairly easy to spot three M.2 ports, which all appear to offer heatsinks to cool the SSDs. These have been a little controversial with some websites stating they make cooling worse on double-sided M.2 SSDs, but thankfully my own testing has shown that modern single-sided SSDs such as Samsung's 960 Evo, 960 Pro and Western Digital's Black NVMe M.2 SSD do benefit, with sustained load temperatures falling by up to 10°C.

If you're not a fan of RGB lighting then this board is probably not for you - I've seen less illumination on Christmas trees and even the rear I/O panel that seems to sport an integrated I/O shield, is lit up too as well as the RAM slots, expansion ports and some multicolor effects courtesy of individually-controlled RGB LEDs in the I/O shroud and audio circuitry.

I've also spotted a USB 3.1 header, power and reset buttons, extra power connectors for the CPU and at least eight SATA ports. There are two other boards in leaked images that were posted today over at Videocards.com, but it's clear that Gigabyte is going all-out with the latest features for Intel's new high-end platform. For more Intel and AMD news about their forthcoming high-end desktop products, follow me here on Forbes, Twitter or Facebook.