Intel has finally announced its budget-focused chipsets for its latest Core Ultra 200 series desktop CPUs. B860 and H810 are aimed at the mid-range and entry-level price segments, with motherboards sporting these chipsets starting at $99 and $129, respectively.
B860 is the newest chipset in Intel's B-series lineup, sporting 14 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity (not including the CPU lanes), four SATA 3.0 ports, 1Gb Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.3, and Wi-Fi 6 support. Memory support is purportedly limited to 6400 MT/s. USB-based I/O consists of up to 16 USB 3.2 ports and 12 USB 2.0 ports; however, bandwidth for those 12 ports can be changed to power dual 20Gbps USB ports, four 10Gbps ports, or six 5Gbps ports.
H810 is the new entry-level chipset in Intel's lineup, sporting lower PCIe connectivity, USB connectivity, and memory capacity. The chipset features four SATA 3.0 ports, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 1Gb ethernet, dual eSPI ports, and four SATA 3.0 connectors. Memory frequency support is rated at 6400 MT/s; however, DIMM slot capacity has been reduced to 1 DPC (DIMM per channel), meaning H810 only supports two memory slots at most. PCIe connectivity is rated at Gen 4 speeds with 8 lanes in total (again, not including CPU lanes). H810 supports up to 10 USB 2.0 ports with options to switch the ten USB ports down to dual 20Gbps ports or four 5Gbps ports, and up to four USB 3.2 ports.
As previously iterated, H810 motherboard pricing will start at $99, and B860 motherboard pricing will start at $129. Intel revealed four vendors for each motherboard series, with H810 comprised of Asus, Gigabyte ASRock and Colorful options. B860 was advertised with Gigabyte Maxsum, MSI and Asus ROG options. Inevitably we will see H810 and B860 motherboards from all of Intel's board partners, however these four main board partners for each chipset will probably be the first to release H810 and B860 motherboards to the market respectively.
