Intel has just launched the new 9-Series chipsets, specifically Z97 and H97, upgrades to Z87 and H87 respectively, designed to support performance desktops.
The 9-series is claimed to offer few improvements over the 8 series and a few key new features with the biggest upgrade in the form of increased data transfer speeds for storage drives.
The key difference between the 2 chipsets is the Z97 support for overclocking when paired with unlocked Intel processors.
The 9-Series chipsets, built to be used with Intel’s LGA1150 socket, are the first chipsets to support all current and planned CPUs using this socket, that includes 4th Generation (Haswell), new 4th Generation (Haswell Refresh) and the and 5th Generation (Broadwell) of Intel Core processors.
The new chipsets, similar to its predecessor, offer most of the same connectivity options – a total of 14 USB ports (up to 6 USB 3.0), an integrated gigabit Ethernet controller, up to 6 SATA III ports, and a total of 8 PCI Express 2.0 lanes for connectivity to other peripherals like Wi-Fi adapters and SSDs.
The Z97 and H97 chipsets focus on increasing speeds with support for M.2 storage specification and use 2 PCI Express lanes for up to 1GB per second of bandwidth. The chipsets also feature an upgraded version of Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT), and can handle hybrid drives combining a small solid-state storage (such as 16GB) with a traditional hard drive.
PCIe 3.0, for graphics support, as in the previous generation chipsets, is available with up to sixteen lanes. However, there is a difference between the new 9-Series chipsets in configuring the lanes – in Z97, one slot at x16 speed, two slots at x8 speed each, or three slots at x8/x4/x4 speeds, while in H97, however, multi-GPU arrangements are actually off the cards as only one slot can be used.
