A preview of the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice motherboard shows a bare PCB, confirming that Intel will be using the Core Ultra branding for its upcoming desktop processors based on the "Arrow Lake-S" microarchitecture. The image displays the CPU socket area where the Socket LGA1851 will be placed, along with the CPU VRM component, BIOS ROM, and DDR5 DIMM slots, among other smaller components. Despite not being compatible with LGA1700, the new LGA1851 socket has a similar cooler mount layout and retains cooler compatibility, similar to how LGA1200 did with LGA1151. The AORUS Pro Ice motherboard features four DDR5 DIMM slots, as DDR4 is not supported by "Arrow Lake," and the CPU VRM solution utilizes DrMOS.
Our previous article discusses the I/O features of "Arrow Lake-S," which closely resemble those of LGA1700 but include four additional PCIe Gen 5 lanes from the CPU, totaling 20 Gen 5 lanes and 12 Gen 4 lanes. All Z890 motherboards will include an M.2 Gen 5 NVMe slot that does not impact the bandwidth of the PCI-Express 5.0 x16 PEG slot, as well as an extra Gen 4 x4 slot that can be used for an M.2 slot or to support onboard devices like Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 controllers. The chipset bus remains DMI 4.0 x8, providing 128 Gbps per direction.
