Today’s chipsets are merely responsible for I/O and have little bearing on performance.
Years ago, it was common for chipsets to have a northbridge and southbridge.
Intel has remained cautious about upgrading its 6Gb/s support after the reliability problems with initial 6-series boards.
We were hoping to see wider SATA 6Gb/s support this time.
Nonetheless, this does mean that all 7-series motherboards will feature at least four USB 3.0 ports.
Interestingly, one of the most significant changes to the 7-series is the removal of a feature.
Whereas 6-series chipsets supported four PCI slots, the 7-series almost completely eliminates native PCI support.
We say “almost” because the business and corporate Q75, Q77 and B75 chipsets still support PCI.
