Intel Arrow Lake chipsets: Z890/B860/H810 specs and differences

Parameters of the chipsets for Intel LGA 1851 platform are out

We recently covered the I/O capabilities of Intel’s new processors for laptops and the LGA 1851 desktop platform, due to replace today’s LGA 1700 boards and Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors in October. However, that was the full features that apply to the more pricy boards based on Z890 chipsets. But Intel will once again resort to segmentation and the cheaper boards will be cut down in various ways, sometimes by quite a bit.

Desktop Arrow Lake will be paired by several chipsets. They can be divided into three groups – H810 for the cheapest boards, B860 for the mainstream, and then a group of more expensive chipsets, Z890, W880, and W870, all three of which offer more or less the full package features without anything being cut, but differ in their intended use. Information about their parameters was again brought by the leaker using the Twitter handle Jaykihn.

Z890, W880 and Q870…

What we wrote about the desktop Arrow Lake / LGA 1851 platform in the last article was about the connectivity of the Z890 chipset, which will be used mainly in enthusiast boards for gaming PCs. The W880 is a workstation variant that has ECC memory support as its unique feature. ECC modules will be supported by Arrow Lake processors, but only in boards with the W880 chipset. The Q870 chipset is in turn intended for “business” computers and provides support for Intel vPro technologies, remote management and so on. vPro is also supported on W880, but not on Z890.

Q870 and W880 do not differ from Z890 in terms of features, at moste there are small differences in the connectivity of Q870 (the chipset provides a maximum of 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes instead of 24 and fewer 10Gb/s and 20Gb/s USB ports), but they will probably not be of great importance.

What these platforms will have in addition to the two cheaper alternatives is a more powerful eight-lane uplink between the CPU and the chipset (×8 DMI4) that has the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 ×8. Furthermore, they are the only ones to support lane splitting from the PCI Express 5.0 ×16 slot provided by the processor for a graphics card. You will be able to use ×8/×8 mode for two graphics cards or other cards, but also ×8/×4/×4, typically used for a graphics card and two SSDs. This means that these boards can have up to three PCIe 5.0 ×4 slots for SSDs (if you are fine with only eight lanes left for the graphics card). This bifurcation option will also make it possible to fit a card adapter for up to three SSD modules in the ×16 slot.

The Z890 chipset will be the only one to allow overclocking of the processor in the full sense – i.e. changing the multiplier (and thus the clock speed) of the cores. The W880 chipset does not allow CPU overclocking, you can only overclock memory (which includes enabling XMP profiles). Q870 will not support memory overclocking or XMP.

B860: What to expect out of more affordable boards

If you don’t want to pay the premium for a Z890 board (perhaps because you’re buying a cheaper locked processor anyway), your choice is usually the B860 platform, the successor to the current B760 or B660. Intel has discontiuned the intermediate step (which would be the H870 chipset, in this generation) altogether. These used to be chipsets with feature set close to the Z chipsets, but with no OC capability, and there was little interest in something such.

What do you lose if you buy a B860 board? First of all of course CPU overclocking is not available, this chipset will only allow you to overclock the memory (manually, or via an XMP profile). As also mentioned, these cheaper chipsets will have a less powerful uplink to the CPU, the uplink has only four lanes, and therefore half the bandwidth, only equal to PCIe 4.0×4.

Furthermore, this chipset will not support PCIe 5.0 ×16 lane splitting for a graphics card, at all. However, these boards will still be allowed to support PCIe 5.0 for this GPU slot, and also for SSDs. B860-based boards will be allowed to utilise the other dedicated PCIe 5.0 ×4 interface provided by CPU for SSD M.2 slots (this interrface, no longer takes away from the lanes intended for the GPU, unlike with Z690, Z790, and B660/B760 platforms).

An SSD in an M.2 slot on a motherboard

Retaining support for Gen5 SSDs is nice, but Intel unfortunately couldn’t resist playing the segmentation game and in exchange took something away elsewhere. B860 boards won’t be allowed to use the second PCIe 4.0×4 SSD interface that comes from the CPU, so there will only ever be one M.2 slot connected to the CPU, the remaining slots will need to be brought out of the chipset, which only has 14 PCIe 4.0 lanes (versus 24 on Z890). This is a pity, because chipset-attached M.2 slots mean worse performance and latency, and the CPU controller must always provide those extra “forbidden lanes” anyway, so it is a waste to not use them on B860.

Also, unlike the higher-end chipsets, B860 is not allowed to create RAID array from NVMe SSD modules. However, it should be possible to do this in software at the operating system level, for example in Linux, where Intel cannot prevent you from doing that.

B860, on the other hand, retains the ability to route 40Gb/s Thunderbolt 4 ports directly from the processor, but B860 boards will only be allowed to have a maximum of one port (and it’s possible that many boards will omit it due to costs). The chipset itself also provides a maximum of two 20Gb/s USB ports instead of five, only four 10Gb/s and a maximum of six 5.0Gb/s USB ports, also with a maximum of four instead of eight SATA ports allowed.

Lowend H810 with significant compromises

The H810 chipset and boards are also connected to the CPU only via four-lane DMI4 uplink, but throw in other often quite artificial limitations. H810 boards are only allowed to support one DDR5 memory module per channel, so they will always have a maximum of two RAM slots. They also allow neither CPU overclocking, nor memory overclocking (which means no clock speed increases are possible above the officially supported memory speed), nor memory overclocking via XMP profiles.

Intel let H810 retain one Thunderbolt port from the processor, and even a PCIe 5.0×16 slot for a graphics card. Unfortunately, though, you’ll lose both CPU-provided PCIe 4.0×4 and PCIe 5.0×4 SSD interfaces with these boards. This doesn’t mean that H810 boards won’t be allowed to have M.2 slots, but they will have to be routed out of the chipset, which only has 8 PCI Express 4.0 lanes for them.

This can lead to slots with only two lanes, or even some M.2 slots that will only support SATA modules, which are not very common and you lose a lot of potential performance with them (you can’t use HMB with SATA drives, for example). Unfortunately, the performance of NVMe storage is also degraded, as all reads and writes will have to be pass through the chipset, which makes read and write latency much worse. In contrast, on the AMD platform, even the cheapest boards usually retain at least one M.2 slot connected directly to the CPU.

Chipsets for Intel LGA 1851 platform (source: Jaykihn)

This cutting of NVMe slots is quite unfortunate, because NVMe SSDs are becoming basically the most popular form of storage – fewer and fewer people are using HDDs (and no one is using them for a system drive anymore), and SATA SSDs are now theselves being replaced by M.2 NVMe modules pretty much everywhere. NVMe drives can be even cheaper today, since they don’t need a housing or cabling.

One of the criticisms of the cheaper boards for AMD processors is that they tend to only have maybe two of these slots (previously even only one). If you want to add SSDs to your system after buying or building it to increase storage capacity, you’ll quickly find out how limiting just one or two slots are. This means that when Intel actively cuts the number of M.2 slots a board can carry like this, they are taking away exactly the expansion option that buyers are most likely to want to take advantage of in the future.

Board with low-end H610 chipset of LGA 1700 platform. Some limitations, such as two memory slots, are imposed directly by Intel (source: Asus)

The H810 chipset also supports fewer USB ports – only four 5.0Gb/s ports, only two 10Gb/s ports, and no 20Gb/s ports (however, remember the Thunderbolt 4/USB4 port from the processor is retained). One difference against B860 is also in the number of supported video outputs – while all other chipsets will be able to provide four display outputs from the integrated graphics, on H810 boards this will be limited to a maximum of three.

It’s a shame that Intel allows these boards to do things that would be much easier to forgo (Thunderbolt, which probably won’t often be used by cheap boards, or PCIe 5.0 for a graphics card similarly), while forbidding things that would be useful, and can’t even be said to improve manufacturing costs, like disallowing ability to bring out M.2 slots for SSDs directly out of the processor.

Release of cheaper boards next year

The Arrow Lake (Intel Core Ultra 200) processors for desktop will be out in October, but this release will probably only include 125W K-series processors for enthusiasts. Similarly, only the more expensive Z890 chipset boards will be released at that time. The cheaper B860 and H810 platforms will probably not be released until early 2025, probably during CES in January.

Sources: Jaykihn

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš


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