Intel B660 Motherboards May Lack PCIe 5.0 Support

[Valantar]

I don't think they to ditch anything, but the Z, H, B, Q. We, on TPU, are supposed to be tech-savvy. When we can't tell otoh what they stand for, they failed in their mission.

Don't forget Wx80.

I think five (six?) chipsets per generation is excessive though. A high-mid-low range makes sense, and I guess one for business with vPro and one for Xeon workstations also makes some sense - though ideally those would just be kept separate in some way. They could at least give them useful and understandable designations. If B is supposed to stand for business, it's weird that they don't support vPro and are universally seen as the "not Z" consumer option. If H stands for Home, why have they never been used in consumer-oriented motherboards to any extent? Why are Hx70 and Qx70 the same number, yet have very different featuresets? Why is Bx60 severely cut down compared to the x70 ranges, despite just being 10 lower in number?

Possible solutions: Make the business chipsets vPro versions of the other chipsets. I.e. instead of Z490, W480, Q470, H470, B460 and H410, you'd have Z490, Z490 vPro, B460, B460 vPro, and H410. Let the BIOS decide whether to unlock OC functionality and the like based on what CPU is installed, instead of using bespoke chipsets for every single little thing. The vPro versions wouldn't be sold much at retail anyway, and OEMs would have the option to flash vPro BIOSes to their PCs at will, without needing to manage stock for 5-6 different pieces of silicon.

If anything, this just mirrors Intel's CPU naming woes: the segmentation itself makes sense in some way, but the naming is confusing and messy to such a degree that it completely undermines the segmentation and makes it seem arbitrary and weird.

 

[bug]

@Valantar I didn't forget about W. It's the only one that makes sense (W ~ workstation), but we don't need to worry about it in the consumer space.

And while I agree we don't need that many chipsets, with the increasing number of features provided, it's easy to see that encourages further segmentation. But it makes you wonder why board manufacturers put up with additional designs and dealing with more SKUs.
For m it's pretty simple: I don't buy cheap, so it's Z or the better H chips for me.

 

[TheUn4seen]

There are plenty of hardware enthusiasts with tight budgets, so the information is still valuable to some degree. That obviously doesn't mean the lack of PCIe 5.0 actually matters, but knowing it's absent is still good.
(...)
Nah, it's more of a consumer/business split, with Z and B being consumer oriented and Q and H being business oriented - but Hx10 also fills out the universal low-end/budget tier. This is a rather implicit split though, as they're all listed as "PC/Client/Tablet" in Intel's documentation (unlike the W480 and W580 which are explicitly for workstations). They're not "pro" chipsets as in supporting vPro, but they are squarely aimed at the OEM and prebuilt markets, including vPro-less business desktops, AIOs and the like. Z and B chipsets are very rarely found in those product segments.

All information is valuable, that's true. And on that note, thank you for clarifying the chipset situation for me.

 

[Valantar]

@Valantar I didn't forget about W. It's the only one that makes sense (W ~ workstation), but we don't need to worry about it in the consumer space.

And while I agree we don't need that many chipsets, with the increasing number of features provided, it's easy to see that encourages further segmentation. But it makes you wonder why board manufacturers put up with additional designs and dealing with more SKUs.
For m it's pretty simple: I don't buy cheap, so it's Z or the better H chips for me.

In some sense I agree - but I don't really see a reason to add more chipsets, as too much segmentation just breeds confusion. It would make perfect sense to me to keep PCIe 5.0 support Z and W series only, 4.0 support for B/mid-range H, and even stick to 3.0 with Hx10 (unless other factors force board quality to be where 4.0 is feeasible at the same cost). And of course for the chipset lanes I'd stick with 4.0 on Z/W only, with the rest getting some mix of 3.0 and 2.0 as before. Anything else will just drive up prices unnecessarily, and adding more tiers just means more costs for distributors and retailers with limited benefits for anyone - you can get pretty affordable Z-series boards anyway, so if you need Z-series features you can typically manage to go that route.