Stefan Mileschin

Galaxy is known more for their graphics cards, and in particular the HOF/SOC series of high end NVIDIA cards - some models of which have featured a white PCB. So you can imagine my surprise to see a motherboard sitting in the line of ‘new products’.

The Galaxy Z87-HOF has one feature which sets it apart from all other Z87 motherboards – it claims to have full PCIe 3.0 x16/x16/x16/x16 support using only one PLX chip. Normally on motherboards we encounter the PLX 8747 which takes 16 CPU lanes and multiplexes/buffers them into 32. The Galaxy Z87-HOF uses an upgraded version of the PLX with the number 8780, providing 64 lanes of output for the 16 lanes input. The 8747 version costs around $40 to the manufacturers, whereas this other model is nearer $100, so we can imagine the Z87 HOF might be a little expensive, although we get full bandwidth and latency of only a single PLX chip, despite the x16 uplink limitation. The Z87-HOF uses the high-end IR3550 ICs from International Rectifier (the same ones we see on Gigabyte UP motherboards) – these are around $4 each and this motherboard has 16.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7043/c...ards-psus-ssds