Gigabyte's AORUS Z890 PRO ICE motherboard's PCB has leaked out which has spilled the beans on Intel's Core Ultra Desktop CPU family.
Gigabyte Z890 Motherboard PCB Reveals LGA 1851 Socket Pinout & Intel Core Ultra Desktop CPU Support
The prominent hardware leaker on X, @9550pro has posted a pic on his account of an early PCB of a Gigabyte AORUS Z8890 motherboard. This particular section of the motherboard reveals crucial information about Intel's next-gen platform and confirms the naming convention for both the motherboard chipset and Intel's next-gen CPUs which were already kind of out there with recent reveals.
Several motherboard makers showed off their Z890 motherboards but had to hide the chipset name and the CPU support since it fell under Intel's embargo but some boards exposed the socket naming and chipset naming convention.
The motherboard belongs to the AORUS lineup and its full name is "Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Pro ICE" as it appears near the DIMMs. It's also clear that this motherboard is made for the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processors, i.e., Intel Arrow Lake chips, and the naming convention is confirmed before the official reveal by Intel.
Even though the socket is missing from the board, the socket name appears near one of its corners, clearly stating "LGA 1851". Moreover, the board will be using DDR5 memory exclusively, transitioning fully to the new memory standard, unlike the LGA 1700 platform. According to a recent leak, Intel's 800 motherboard series will consist of five different chipsets with Z890 being the flagship one. We can also tell that this is an early PCB since the official motherboard was already shown by Gigabyte at Computex and features a white PCB as shown below:
The Z890 will bring a total of 60 HSIO lanes: 26 from the CPU and 34 from the PCH. The total PCI-E lanes will be 48, offering Gen 5.0 speed natively for both M.2 storage drives and graphics cards. That said, the Z890 is supposed to launch before any other chipset, while the remaining ones will follow in 2025.
According to recent reports, both Z890 motherboards and Intel Core Ultra 200 "K-Series" CPUs will be launching in October this year. The first batch of CPUs will consist of unlocked SKUs rated at 125W that will hit the shelves along with the Z890 motherboards. We already have some leaked specs of Core Ultra 9 285K but information about the rest of the SKUs is still under wraps. There are 35W and 65W variants too, but they most likely won't be available until next year, coinciding with the launch of the locked 800 series chipsets.
Intel 800-series chipset "preliminary" configurations:
| Chipset Name | Z890 | W880 | Q870 | B860 | H810 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total HSIO Lanes (CPU+PCH) | 60 (26+34) | 60 (26+34) | 56 (26+30) | 45 (21+24) | 33 (17+16) |
| Total PCIe Lanes | 48 | 48 | 44 | 34 | 24 |
| CPU TB4/USB4 Ports | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| DMI Gen4 Lanes | 24 | 24 | 20 | 14 | 8 |
| SATA III (6 Gbps) Lanes | 8 | 8 | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| USB2 Ports | 14 | 14 | 14 | 12 | 10 |
| USB3.2 (20G) Ports | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| USB3.2 (10G) Ports | 10 | 10 | 8 | 4 | 2 |
| USB3.2 (5G) Ports | 10 | 10 | 10 | 6 | 4 |
| IA & BCLK OC | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Memory OC | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| CPU PCIe 5.0 Lanes | 1x16 + 1x4 2x8 + 1x4 1x8 + 3x4 | 1x16 + 1x4 2x8 + 1x4 1x8 + 3x4 | 1x16 + 1x4 2x8 + 1x4 1x8 + 3x4 | 1x16 + 1x4 | 1x16 |
| CPU PCIe 4.0 Lanes | 1x4 | 1x4 | 1x4 | 0 | 0 |
| Memory Channels/DPC | 2/2 | 2/2 | 2/2 | 2/2 | 2/1 |
| ECC | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Simultaneous Displays | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| PCIE RAID 0/1/5/10 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| SATA RAID 0/1/5/10 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Intel vPro | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
News Source: HXL
