First Workstation-Grade Motherboards for Intel Comet Lake Emerge

DFI has listed two of its motherboards for Intel's upcoming 10th-Generation Comet Lake processors in its 2020 product catalog. 

The CMS310-W480 and CMS310-Q470 are MicroATX motherboards based around the W480 and Q470 chipsets, respectively. The first is aimed at the workstation segment, while the latter is for the enterprise market. Therefore, only the CMS310-W480 will be able to support Comet Lake Xeon chips upon release. 

Both motherboards carry the LGA1200 CPU socket to accommodate the next wave of Intel desktop processors that span up to 10 cores. They each have four DDR4 memory slots to support up to 128GB of RAM, and the W480 chipset will also support ECC memory, the specs say. According to leaked information, Comet Lake natively supports DDR4-2933 memory modules.

Regarding expansion options, the CMS310-W480 and CMS310-Q470 each feature two PCIe x16 slots and two PCIe x4 slots. Although DFI doesn't mention the nature of the expansion slots, we already know they're are restricted to the PCIe 3.0 interface after Intel failed to get PCIe 4.0 to work on with Comet Lake.

Storage options on DFI's offerings consist of four SATA III ports and two M.2 ports (one E-Key and one M-Key). Realtek's ALC888 codec handles audio on both motherboards.

The two motherboards also share the same connectivity options. They each have two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, four USB 4.0 ports, two RS-232/422/485 connectors and two RS-232 connectors. DFI also implemented one VGA connector and two DisplayPort outputs on the CMS310-W480 and CMS310-Q470.

DFI labels the CMS310-W480 and CMS310-Q470 as "Coming Soon." Comet Lake was originally scheduled to be presented to the hardware world at CES 2020. However, its launch has since been pushed to mid-April.