Our readers spotted an interesting visual detail that missed us during our coverage of GIGABYTE's three new socket LGA2066 motherboards unveiled at Computex 2019. One of the three boards, the X299S Designare 10G, has the hard-marking "X499" on its CPU VRM heatsink. Another detail that strikes us is that none of the three new boards we pictured has "X299" printed on the PCB anywhere. The Designare 10G has a sticker below the printed GIGABYTE logo that reads "X299G Designare 10G." The purported X299G Aorus Master has another interesting detail: right above the "Aorus Master" print, there's a tiny sticker marked "X299G," positioned as if it's covering up a printed marking on the PCB itself.

All these details lead us to wonder if GIGABYTE tried to cover up that these boards are in fact based on the unannounced X499 Express chipset, and made to appear like they are X299. We only have paper stickers and the booth placards that indicate "X299," while a metal embossing on the Designare 10G's VRM heatsink reads X499. Intel in its Computex 2019 keynote announced that it will introduce new Core X HEDT processors. It's been over 2 years since the first Core X "Skylake-X" processors launched in Q2-2017. Intel refreshed the lineup in 2018 with 9th generation branding and soldered TIM, with a few specification improvements across the product-stack, but a largely unchanged silicon. It's likely that the Fall 2019 release could see new chips with increased core counts, perhaps even the fabled 22-core die, and some hardware mitigation against recent security vulnerabilities.

AMD is going ahead with its plans to launch a new HEDT platform chipset dubbed X499, according to a HD Technologia report. Originally rumored to launch alongside the 2nd Generation Ryzen Threadripper family, X499 was delayed indefinitely, and the current X399 chipset continued as AMD's premier HEDT chipset, with existing motherboards receiving BIOS updates to support 2nd Gen Threadrippers, and some motherboard manufacturers launching newer models with beefed up CPU VRM designs to better cope with the 24-core and 32-core Threadrippers.

AMD X499 is reportedly back on the company's roadmap, and slated for a CES 2019 unveiling (January). What's interesting here is AMD sticking to the model number "499" after it emerged that Intel's next HEDT chipset could be named "X599." There's no information on what X499 brings to the table, but there are two big areas for improvement: first, the downstream PCI-Express connectivity needs to be updated to current PCI-Express gen 3.0 standards; and second, unless Threadripper WX processors are hardwired to only support quad-channel memory; X499 could introduce 8-channel memory, which could make it even more competitive against Intel's upcoming 28-core HEDT processor that has 6-channel memory.