Intel’s LGA1700 platform has been on the market for a little over two years, but there is still demand for the older LGA1200 platform. Additionally, as a hint: momomo_usAsus has quietly released three new H510 motherboards. Asus advertises this trio of motherboards as his H510, but uses his previous H470 chipset.
It’s nothing new for motherboard makers to reuse old chipsets in new products and vice versa. It’s a very old custom. There are many reasons to recycle chipsets. In some cases, the original product was designed with a particular chipset in mind, but that chipset is said to have reached end-of-life (EOL) status. So the vendor should replace it with something else. It’s also possible that a vendor has a glut of older chipsets that need to be offloaded in some way.
Especially when it comes to H-series chipsets, Intel doesn’t necessarily update from generation to generation unless there is a specific need. Take the latest Intel 700 series chipsets and 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors, for example. Additionally, the chipmaker launched his Z790, H770, and B760 chipsets for enthusiasts and general consumers. Intel may or may not release the H710 chipset, but it doesn’t matter as H610 chipset based motherboards will support Raptor Lake with a simple firmware upgrade.
Contrary to the model name, Asus’ Prime H510M-K R2.0-CSM, Prime H510M-F R2.0, and Prime H510M-K R2.0 motherboards feature the H470 chipset. In practice, this isn’t a bad tradeoff. The H510 chipset is newer, but the H470 chipset offers a great feature set. For example, the H470 supports more DIMMs and RAID arrays per channel and offers more PCIe lanes, USB ports and SATA III ports.
Chipset recycling is bi-directional. Asus introduced older chipsets in their latest products, while Gigabyte did the opposite. The motherboard maker has incorporated the H510 chipset into some of his H410 motherboards of the same brand, such as the H410M S2 V3 and H410M DS2V V3. Both chipsets are priced the same ($28) and offer practically the same features, so the Gigabyte swap is more reasonable. The difference between the two chipsets is that the H510 supports Wi-Fi 6 while the H410 supports Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d).
Intel’s H-series chipsets are geared towards lower-end motherboards, so they have very limited features compared to B-series and K-series chipsets. But given the segment that H-series motherboards compete in, many consumers don’t know or care if their motherboard has a different chipset than what’s advertised, as long as it works. I guess.
