Intel recently announced the  Z77 chipset, a top of the line chipset designed to complement high-end Ivy Bridge parts like the Core i7 3770K, which sounds like a match made in heaven. (Or a match made in Taiwan Ed. )

The successor needed for Haswell processors or the fourth generation Core processors as some like to call them is simply called Z87. The interesting thing about the Z87 is that this chipset has all six SATA connectors supporting SATA 6Gb/sec while the current Z87 has two SATA 6Gb/sec while the remaining four are SATA 3Gb/sec.

Another thing that disappeared with the Z77 chipset is native PCI support and the owners of the ancient PCI devices will have to give up on them.  

It’s not all great in the Intel 2013 chipset future, as we have noticed that Intel failed to mention support for PCIe 3.0 in its current roadmap, despite the fact that it has more PCIe 2.0 channels and general bandwidth available.  

One can argue that PCIe 3.0 won’t change a lot in performance but this is something that remains to be seen on some future graphics cards.