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Intel discontinues its 300-series chipset motherboards based on the LGA 1151 socket


According to ComputerBase, Intel has just confirmed that the company would be discontinuing the 300-series motherboard chipsets, sporting the LGA 1151 socket.  What this basically means is that the production of Intel’s 300 series chipset motherboards, including the high-end H310, H370, Z370 and Z390 models is officially coming to an end.

Z390, Z370, H370, H310, H310D/H310C, B365, B360, and mobile QMS380 motherboards have officially being discontinued starting from January 4, 2021. Intel has already announced last month that the company is retiring its entire 9th gen Coffee Lake “refresh” lineup of desktop processors, so it makes sense to discontinue Coffee Lake and its associated chipsets.

300-series chipset boards will no longer be shipped starting from January 28 next year, 2022, which is the last product discontinuance shipment date. The last product discontinuance order date is July 23, 2021.

The variants Q370, QM370, HM370, CM246 and H310 will continue to exist in the embedded market for a while, where long terms and warranties for support will apply as usual, reports ComputerBase.

From the PDF document, we can see the actual production will end in July of this year, and by the beginning of 2022 sales for the 300-Series chipset and its motherboards will also end. No more CPUs based on LGA 1151 socket are going to be manufactured in future.

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It made sense for the company to discontinue its 9th gen core CPU lineup, since it has already been succeeded by the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S family which also features multi-threading support on all the SKUs.

Another reason for this discontinuation would be that Intel is prepping to launch its 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S desktop CPU lineup, in first quarter of 2021, which is expected to share the same socket and motherboard compatibility as the current 10th Gen Comet Lake processors, thus providing an upgrade path even for those rocking the flagship Core i9-10900K Comet lake CPU.

Rocket Lake-S will offer first-time PCIe Gen 4 support on Intel desktop processors, and offer enhanced overclocking and double-digit percentage IPC benefits over the current Comet Lake-S CPU lineup.

Intel’s Rocket Lake will use a 14nm backport of the 10nm Sunny Cove cores found in the Ice Lake processors. Also, the RKL CPU lineup will max out at 8 cores/16 threads.

If for some reason you still want to grab a Coffee Lake CPU, Tom’s Hardware reports that Micro Center has several Coffee Lake deals going on, like the Core i5-9600K at just $169.99 and the Core i7-9700K for $249.99.

Stay tuned for more tech news!