Thursday, July 4th 2024
Intel's Upcoming 800-series Chipsets Leak in Detail
What appears to be the full details of all of Intel's upcoming 800-series chipsets have leaked and although we've already seen what the Z890 chipset will offer, no details of the other SKUs have leaked to date. Maybe the biggest news is that there won't be an H870 chipset this time around, according to the leaker @jaykihn0 over at X/Twitter. The full range appears to be Z890, B860 and H810 for consumers, W880 for workstations and Q870 for corporate desktops. That said, the Z890 and W880 are identical in terms of slots and ports, but whereas the W880 gains full ECC support and Intel vPro and remote management, it loses the CPU and bus overclocking features of the Z890. The Q870 loses four chipset PCIe 4.0 lanes, one 20 Gbps or two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports, but is otherwise similar to the Z890, minus all the overclocking features, but with Intel vPro and remote management.
The B860 ends up on the chopping block as always and loses not only 10 chipset PCIe lanes compared to the Z890 chipset, but also four lanes from the CPU and four lanes on the DMI interface to the chipset. On top of that bifurcation goes out the window toigether with PCIe RAID and the chipset is only capable of having two 20 Gbps or four 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports, but at least memory overclocking is still on the table. Finally, the H810 chipset is as basic as it gets, with no extra CPU PCIe lanes beyond the 16 lanes for a graphics card, but they are at least PCIe 5.0 this time around. The chipset itself is only equipped with a mere eight PCIe 4.0 lanes and it gets zero 20 Gbps and two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. Note that all platforms support one or two Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports, but it's unclear if this is native support or via an add-on chip. Also note that the USB ports are shared and the maximum count is that for the 5 Gbps ports in the details below, so the Z890 for example, doesn't have 25 USB 3.2 ports in total, but rather only 10. All in all, we'll see a migration to PCIe 5.0 for the x16 slot across the entire 800-series chipset range and from the B860 and up, all chipsets will have a dedicated PCIe 5.0 x4 interface that will most likely be used for an M.2 slot. Also, the PCIe lane count is the maximum, but due to Intel's HSIO layout, some resources will be shared with SATA and Ethernet, which means not all PCIe lanes will be accessible.
Sources:
@jaykihn0 (on X/Twitter), via VideoCardz
The B860 ends up on the chopping block as always and loses not only 10 chipset PCIe lanes compared to the Z890 chipset, but also four lanes from the CPU and four lanes on the DMI interface to the chipset. On top of that bifurcation goes out the window toigether with PCIe RAID and the chipset is only capable of having two 20 Gbps or four 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports, but at least memory overclocking is still on the table. Finally, the H810 chipset is as basic as it gets, with no extra CPU PCIe lanes beyond the 16 lanes for a graphics card, but they are at least PCIe 5.0 this time around. The chipset itself is only equipped with a mere eight PCIe 4.0 lanes and it gets zero 20 Gbps and two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. Note that all platforms support one or two Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports, but it's unclear if this is native support or via an add-on chip. Also note that the USB ports are shared and the maximum count is that for the 5 Gbps ports in the details below, so the Z890 for example, doesn't have 25 USB 3.2 ports in total, but rather only 10. All in all, we'll see a migration to PCIe 5.0 for the x16 slot across the entire 800-series chipset range and from the B860 and up, all chipsets will have a dedicated PCIe 5.0 x4 interface that will most likely be used for an M.2 slot. Also, the PCIe lane count is the maximum, but due to Intel's HSIO layout, some resources will be shared with SATA and Ethernet, which means not all PCIe lanes will be accessible.
43 Comments on Intel's Upcoming 800-series Chipsets Leak in Detail
www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sony-stops-producing-blu-ray-and-optical-disks-for-consumer-market-business-to-business-production-to-continue-until-unprofitable
Expansion cards for SATA? Likewise flaky. Lot of pitfalls in that market, often having to do with the stealth inclusion of port multipliers. Your most reliable option if you need lots of extra SATA ports is an enterprise grade HBA, which can be bought used for a reasonable price from a reputable vendor on Ebay, but you do have to do your homework (e.g. make sure the product is in IT mode), and the total cost for this set up, once you factor in breakout cables, and possibly supplemental cooling (because HBAs can run hot), isn't trivial.
It is preferable to have some amount of onboard SATA to work with before you have to resort to the aforementioned methods. Maybe not a ton, but some. I was happy with six as the standard. The Z890's "up to eight" sounds promising too. As @TheLostSwede says, it isn't a requirement to include eight ports, but why not have a couple of models that do?
I don't think your ODD analogy holds up. Maybe some day HDDs will be comparably superfluous, but today the comparison isn't even close. And we also still have SATA SSDs, which retain a fair bit of utility in large part precisely because they can be plugged in via SATA instead of taking up an M.2/PCIe slot. In any case, it's always struck me as bizarre when DIY PC enthusiasts argue for fewer options.
SATA's just... done IMO. It's become like USB-A 2.0 or the mp3 format, we know it's obsolete and that it has been surpassed in practically every way, but at the same time, it's good enough and also, convenient. Remember SATA Express? It died within a generation. U.2? You only saw adoption of that on consumer-grade boards with the Intel X99 platform. Also gone within a generation, still used in the enterprise every now and then, niche format. My personal needs with SATA are entirely addressable through docks and external adapters, and when it comes down to it, I'd argue the vast majority of people's as well. Time to leave some room for the next generation of storage to grow, IMO.
DIY NAS community have been moaning about modern boards with lack of SATA and PCIe slots as an example. So its kind of reversal of expectation.
See the rig in my sig, even my main rig is still using 5 SATA devices as well (for some reason I missed out the SATA 860 EVO on main rig spec list so thats the 5th).
One reason I can think off is when using a case with USB 2 ports, if USB 2 headers got removed *boom* ports useless.
I dont think any board has ever added connectivity for the max amount of ports.
Great, another new Intel-platform which allows me to use my many Videostorage-HDDs in internal HDD enclosures without additional SATA-controllers :)So true!
I have many SATA-SSDs, big HDDs for Data-Storage, NVME M.2 will be never my choice of Long-time-data-storage.
And Hot-swap which I use more than 15 years is still not possible with NVME M.2 and probably it will never be possible. And for me it´s a basic feature
In my PC i only use m.2 for storage, sata hdd's/SSD's are too slow for me, but i get some others still use them in their rigs.
USB3x was never so stable as SATA, and I have many many external drives also
Sequential read/write is just over 200MB/s which is good enough.
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I don´t want to eject/insert everytime single HDDs or want to place on my desk 6 docking station :)
You maybe see know, different requirements :)
@Topic
Nice to see Intel allow up to 8x SATA, I remember Intel were very fast with removing IDE/PATA from it´s chipsets
But I´m not sure which Mainboard-manufacturer will use this possibility, maybe Asrock could be again the one