GIGABYTE has teased its upcoming AORUS Z890 PRO ICE motherboard with a leaked PCB, gearing us up for the big launch of Intel’s next-gen Core Ultra 200 series “Arrow Lake” CPUs.
In a new post on X by leaker “9550pro” posted a picture on his account of an early PCB of GIGABYTE’s upcoming AORUS Z890 motherboard. In the photo, a particular portion of the motherboard shows us that Intel is indeed using the Z890 chipset (which hasn’t been confirmed, only leaked) and the Core Ultra 200 series naming scheme for its upcoming CPUs, shifting the desktop chips away from the 14th Gen Core CPU naming scheme.
Multiple motherboard manufacturers have teased next-gen Z890 motherboard designs, but they had to hide the chipset name and CPU support because they’re NDA bound by Intel’s strong embargo. However, some boards did tease the socking naming and chipset naming convention.
As we can see right next to the DDR5 DIMM sockets, the motherboard in question is GIGABYTE’s upcoming AORUS Z890 PRO ICE motherboard. It’ll feature the LGA 1851 socket and support Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 series “Arrow Lake-S” processors. The socket itself is missing, but the LGA 1851 socket name is printed near one of its corners.
Intel’s new 800-series chipset and upcoming waves of 800-series motherboards are DDR5 exclusive, seeing the company move away from DDR4 as the previous-gen LGA 1700 socket and current-gen 14th Gen Core CPUs could use either DDR4 or DDR5. Arrow Lake is DDR5 only, and LGA 1851 boards are DDR5 only.
The flagship Z890 motherboard has 60 HSIO lanes: 26 from the CPU and 34 from the PCH, for a total of 48 PCIe lanes available on Z890, which is not bad at all. You’ll have PCIe 5.0 speeds natively for both M.2 SSD storage and PCIe 5.0-ready graphics cards, with Z890 launching before any other 800-series chipset, with the rest of the 800-series chipset fleet launching in 2025.