THE CRUNCH
Gigabyte has confirmed that its full range of Raptor Lake-era LGA1700 motherboards, including Z790 models, will support a lineup of "future processors" from Intel. The company hasn't named the chips, though they're widely rumoured to be Intel's Raptor Lake Next range. According to Gigabyte, existing owners will only need a BIOS update to run one of the new CPUs on a Z790, B760 or H610 board, with no need to replace the motherboard or rebuild the system.
The Z790 inclusion is the new part of the story. An earlier Gigabyte statement, later deleted, covered only its budget B760 and H610 boards, and Tom's Hardware reported at the time that Z790, Z690 and B660 models were left out. The fresh announcement extends that promised support across the whole lineup, covering both DDR5 and DDR4 variants.
The rumoured chips themselves remain unofficial. Leaks suggest a Core 200-series range without the Ultra tag, focused on budget and mid-range parts rather than a Core i9 flagship, including a possible Core i5-14600K successor with eight P-Cores and eight E-Cores. Intel has not disclosed specifications or pricing.