Intel 800-series motherboard details leak ahead of release

The comprehensive details of Intel's upcoming 800-series chipsets have been leaked. While we've previously had insight into what the Z890 chipset will offer, information regarding the other SKUs was difficult to find. According to the new leak doing the rounds, the H870 chipset will be omitted from the line-up, leaving us with Z890, B860, and H810 for consumers, W880 for workstations, and Q870 for corporate PCs.

Jaykihn shared a table with the specifications of each chipset. Regarding connectivity, the Z890 and W880 share similar slots and ports. As for features, that's where things start to differ, with the latter supporting ECC memory, Intel vPro, and remote administration while the former supports CPU and bus overclocking capabilities. On the other hand, the Q870 lacks several key features compared to the W880, including four chipset PCIe 4.0 lanes and USB ports. Moreover, it also doesn't support memory OC, unlike the W880 and Z890.

Image credit: Jaykihn

As expected, the B860 chipset will be considerably inferior in specs and features compared to the higher-tier chipsets. Compared to the Z890, it will lose not only PCIe lanes but also CPU lanes, USB ports, SATA lanes and DMI interface lanes. Moreover, several features, such as bifurcation, CPU overclocking and PCIe RAID, have been axed, although RAM overclocking remains possible.

Lastly, the H810 chipset appears relatively straightforward, with no additional CPU PCIe lanes beyond those required for a graphics card. However, it's worth noting that the PCIe lanes have been upgraded to PCIe 5.0 this time, offering eight PCIe 4.0 lanes and two USB 3.2 connectors.

It's also mentioned that all systems will offer Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports, though it's unclear if this is native or via an add-on chip. Also, remember that the USB ports are shared, with the Z890 chipset offering 10 USB 3.2 ports in total. Furthermore, the entire 800-series chipset family is set to migrate to PCIe 5.0 for the x16 slot, with all chipsets from B860 onwards including a dedicated PCIe 5.0 x4 interface, presumably for an M.2 slot. However, due to Intel's HSIO arrangement, not all PCIe lanes will be available, as specific resources will be shared with SATA and Ethernet.

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KitGuru says: Were the leaked 800-series specs in line with your expectations? If you were to build a new system based on Arrow Lake-S, what chipset would you go with for your motherboard?

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