Asus has provided us with some tasty teasers on its upcoming Z87 motherboards.
On its Republic of Gamers website, Asus has provided us with 3 teasers for its upcoming products that will support Intel's Haswell CPU. As is the case with most good teasers, they tell us very little and make us all desperate for more information. Firstly, we have an image of the Gryphon 287 Rev 1.01 motherboard that may be the successor to the Z77 Sabertooth.
Whilst the second teaser is definitely not a motherboard and appears to be some sort of accessory, we haven't a clue as to what it actually is.
Finally we have a motherboard hidden by chocolaty goodness that only reveals the Z87-Deluxe brand name. "Deluxe" is of course amongst the company's most expensive and luxurious range of products.
Unfortunately we'll have to wait at least until Computex 2013 in June for more information on Asus's Z87 range of motherboards.
The new motherboards are Socket 1150. SB and IV need socket 1155, so they aren't compatible.
Sounds more like a chocolate than a processor...
Anyway, as for the second picture the exposed pins on it remind me a lot of the way the secondary connector next to the USB interface on my H100i looks.
Chances are they removed some pins that have been redundant(extra unused ground ect). They do not need more pins unless they plan to have more features like the triple and quad channel memory on lga 1366 and lga 2011.
The change more then anything prevents installation of a cpu that will not work.
Unfortunately Haswell won't be a decent CPU boost, as the tech is going into integrated graphics HD 4600. A total waste for us enthusiasts running discrete GPU's. The future is dark... hardware and software(Win8)
Maybe its a revision of ROG's OC key.
Change of pins because the VRM is build into the CPU. Not because it's redundant and if that is, then all the ground pins on the CPU socket are redundant.
Maybe it's a next revision of ROG's OC key.
Change a number of pins is due to VRM being build into the CPU, not because of extra unused ground.
I was thinking the same sorta thing. Maybe it'll read measurements or something?
Is Asus teaming up with Mars, Inc. to blow our minds? Doubt it. But I could sure eat some chocolate now.
While putting the VRM on-package reduces the number of Vcc/ground pins required for power, high-speed IOs still require nearly as many ground pins as there are IOs to mitigate noise from ground loops. Packages featuring large amounts of IO are going to continue having an equally large amount of ground pins for the foreseeable future.
The few fewer pins likely came out of the Vcc budget since less than half as much current is required assuming the VRM is fed from 3.3V or ~1/10th as much if fed from 12V.