Intel Z970 Chipset for Nova Lake May Span Both High-End and Mainstream Markets
Let me explain: classically, Intel releases a range of motherboard chipsets that board vendors can use to fill out the full range of the DIY motherboard market. This usually goes something like this: a value-focused H-series, a mid-range B-series, a high-end H-series, and then the Z-series, which is usually very similar to the high-end H-series, just with overclocking enabled. There are others, like Q and W and P chipsets, but they're out of the scope of this conversation for right now.
So what Jaykihn is saying seems to be that motherboards based on the Z970 chipset will be available at price points currently occupied by the B860 series. This actually makes more sense than it might seem at first, because Z970 is not the high-end LGA 1954 chipset. Instead Z970, based on current leaks, is essentially the same thing as B960, except that it doesn't support CPU overclocking. Z970, then, seems to be a direct competitor to AMD's value-priced B850 motherboards that also support CPU overclocking.
The top-end chipset for LGA 1954 will actually be the Z990. Compared to Z970, this chip gains important capabilities: much more USB connectivity (as many as six extra ports), four more SATA ports, a second USB4 port, and the ability to bifurcate its CPU PCIe lanes. It also has twelve PCIe 5.0 lanes hanging off of the PCH where Z970 has none. There's also the inclusion of PCIe RAID support, which Z970 misses.
Given all that, it actually becomes pretty easy to understand how Z970 could satisfy B860 customers: because it's basically a B960 without the artificial lock on CPU overclocking. You can find some pretty fancy motherboards based on AMD's B850 chipset, and it's likely that we'll see some pretty fancy boards based on Z970 too, but make no mistake: it's a budget chipset dressed up for the Nova Lake prom.
