Intel’s Z87 Haswell Chipset Reported To Finally Lose PCI Slots and Offer All 6Gbs SATA

It's been a nice, long ride for the conventional PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot, but with the introduction of Intel's game-changing Haswell platform, the Santa Clara chip maker is reportedly doing away with support for the legacy ports. If you've been holding onto an earlier model Sound Blaster card or any other peripheral still using the old-school ports, go ahead and plan their retirement party now.

Intel's Z87 chipset for Haswell isn't just about getting rid of old technologies. In a nod towards future-proofing, Z87 will reportedly boast support for half a dozen SATA 6Gbps connectors, rather than two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps as supported on the Z77 chipset. In other words, Intel is going all-in with SATA 6Gbps (which is backwards compatible with SATA 3Gbps, so don't go tossing your old hard drives).


Other goodies contained within Z87 include support for 14 USB ports (four of which are USB 3.0), eight PCI Express 2.0 ports, two DIMM modules per channel, integrated voltage regulators, integrated triple display support, and TRIM support in RAID 0 storage configurations.