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Intel's next-gen LGA1954 motherboard platform hasn't been formally announced, but that didn't stop partners Gigabyte from showing off the first Z990 board at Computex last week.
The news was pieced together by Chinese outlet BenchLife and American publication PCWorld after visitors to the Gigabyte booth were shown a mysterious unnamed motherboard. The future motherboard's socket was covered, with tape obscuring branding elsewhere, but small "Z99Pro" text on the rear of the board was visible and confirmed the new platform.
As well as being an exciting confirmation of the upcoming release for PC nerds like myself, the Aorus-branded motherboard also hints towards the new platform's capabilities. Most critically, the platform supports three PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs (!), plus three additional PCIe 4.0 SSDs for an impressive six NVMe drives in total - potentially without the bifurcation of the PCIe x16 graphics card slot you often see when current-gen motherboards are filled to capacity. Rumours reported by IgorsLab put the total number of PCIe lanes on Z990 at 48, with 12 of these being PCIe 5.0 from the chipset.
There are also three eight-pin CPU power connectors visible on the board, something that's only found in a handful of existing current-gen Intel models. This could hint that the Aorus board is an extremely high-end model with extra power for overclocking, or that the platform in general uses higher wattages.
There's even a dedicated fan for the RAM slots, again suggesting support for higher RAM frequencies and therefore the need for active cooling.
The rear I/O is also impressive, with four USB-C ports, at least one of which could be Thunderbolt 5, plus eight USB-A ports and two gigabit+ ethernet ports. The board also includes more standard fare, including a quick-release Wi-Fi connector, digital and analogue audio ports and HDMI 2.1.
Intel's 900-series chipset succeeds the current 800-series, moving from the Core Ultra 200-series Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake-S processors to next-gen 300-series Nova Lake-S models. It's also possible that Intel will take a page from AMD's book by supporting next-next-gen Razor Lake CPUs too.
The new CPUs and motherboards are expected to arrive later this year, though some time after the first Arc G3 and G3 Extreme gaming handhelds that were launched at Computex.