PCH - The Platform Controller Hub Chipsets

PCH - The Platform Controller Hub Chipsets

Alright, with new CPUs also come new chipsets for the motherboards. Here is an overview of the new Series 8 Chipset from Intel. Paired with Haswell processors come a handful of new motherboard chipsets, five are intended for desktop processors, namely the B85, H87, Q85, Q87 and Z87. For end consumers like you and me the H87 chipset will be less performance targeted and comes with better support for HTPC monitor connectivity. The Z87 chipset is targeted at performance and enthusiast end users allowing much more tweaking and providing performance features. Below, you can see a block table with the differences in Series 7 and now the series 8 chipset and thus motherboard features. 

In-between say a Z77 and Z87 chipset only a few things have changed. Six native USB 3.0 support are to be found on the Z87 chipset as well as PCIe Gen 3 graphics slots and native SATA 6Gbps ports. Z87 will get six SATA 6 Gbps ports which is the biggest difference with Z77.
 

Overall though the new Z87 series chipsets will come with the same amount of controllers as P67/Z77. That means you get six SATA3 ports native from the PCH chip. With PCIe Gen 3, SLI and Crossfire with supported cards should run quite well on them.