Next-gen Z170 Intel Skylake motherboards on sale in August

We know Intel’s Skylake processors will follow closely on the heels of Broadwell, the delayed 14nm CPUs that Intel announced on Tuesday will be available in the next 30-60 days. But we haven’t known exactly how narrow the gap between the two processor releases will be. Now we may have an answer. According to representatives at Biostar and MSI on Computex’s exhibit floor, their new Z170 motherboards that will support Skylake will be available this August.

Skylake will be the first processor release from Intel to use the new 100 Series chipset, which supports DDR4 RAM, increased bandwidth between chipset and CPU and more PCIe lanes. According to the representatives I spoke with at MSI and Biostar, motherboards for new processor sockets typically go on sale shortly before the processors themselves. A representative at Asus’ Computex booth told me that the RoG G20CB desktop system running on a Skylake processor will be available in September. Between the August motherboard release and a September release for Asus’ compact desktop, boxed processors can’t be far behind.

We also spoke to other motherboard manufacturers who've also stated their Z170 boards (which, like existing Z97 series boards, will support overclocking) will be available in August. We've reached out to Intel with a request for comment and will update this story if they respond.

Update: According to representatives at ASRock, 100 Series chipset motherboards will be available in early August, with Skylake processors also being available later that same month. One caveat: exact timing from Intel is still in flux, and their schedule could easily change some between now and August.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).