News continues to trickle out ahead of Intel's expected refresh to their Haswell CPU range. Seeking to reassure customers still on the fence over upgrading their current Haswell CPU to one of the newer generation, GIGABYTE have released a document detailing compatibility information for each member of their 8-series motherboard collection.

This series of motherboards - be they of the Z, H, Q or B class - are each designed to accommodate LGA 1150 CPUs commonly known as Intel 4th Generation or Haswell. Those upcoming will therefore also be LGA1150, but BIOS updates are generally required to ensure that the CPU is correctly recognised. The BIOS flashing process is quite straight-forward these days, will ample description in the motherboard manual for both OS-based updates and updates via a USB flash drive. Gone are the days of needing a floppy disk or CD to update.



Regrettably most motherboards require a recognised CPU to be installed before a BIOS upgrade can take place. With that in mind those purchasing a new 8-series motherboard along with one of the new CPUs will need to ensure that the motherboard has been flashed to the latest BIOS. Many retailers will take care of this for you, so ask when placing your order. In the fullness of time all the new motherboards will be shipped with the BIOS straight from the manufacturer.

At present we are not expecting a generation transition using the same socket type, as happened when Ivybridge succeeded Sandybridge. Instead it's anticipated that the forthcoming chips are more akin to the i7-2700K's release around a year after the i7-2600K; that is to say a slight speed boost and potentially better voltages and temps at that speed in line with a more mature manufacturing process.



Source: Via Press Release