Intel still hasn’t said a word about new LGA1700 processors. GIGABYTE, on the other hand, can’t stop preparing for them, and it seems to have second thoughts about how much it said the first time.
In an October 13 press release, GIGABYTE announced a new BIOS for its entire Z790, B760, and H610 lineup, covering both DDR5 and DDR4 boards. The release says the update extends compatibility to “future processors made for the established Socket LGA1700 platform.” The details:
- Coverage: GIGABYTE claims it’s the first in the industry to cover every model across all three chipsets.
- Availability: The BIOS is available now.
- Process: Download, flash, and drop in a supported CPU.
- Board list: The complete list of supported boards and BIOS versions is on GIGABYTE’s motherboard pages.
This is an expansion of GIGABYTE’s October 9 announcement, which covered only B760 and H610 boards. That’s the release behind our story on DDR4 refusing to die as new Intel processors supporting it are expected to launch.
There’s one notable difference. The October 9 release said those processors were expected in early 2027, but that page at gigabyte.com/press/news/2460 now returns a 404 error. It no longer appears in the newsroom list on the new release page, which jumps from October 6 to October 2. The October 13 release includes no timeframe at all.
Reading between the lines: you don’t pull a release because the information was wrong. You pull it because someone, presumably Intel, would rather you hadn’t published the date. Intel has been signaling that LGA1700 isn’t done. It said earlier this year that Raptor Lake would keep getting support in 2026 on both DDR4 and DDR5 setups, and we’ve already seen a Bartlett Lake-S chip running on a Z790 board.
The timing also makes sense. With the cheapest 32GB DDR5-6000 kit now at $449.97, a CPU upgrade that drops into a DDR4 board you already own is a attractive option. That’s especially true for anyone who would otherwise be buying a new platform and a new memory kit together.
If you’re on a GIGABYTE LGA1700 board, flash the new BIOS before you swap CPUs, not after, and keep a known-good version handy in case you need to roll back. As for what the chips actually are and when they’re coming, that’s Intel’s announcement to make. GIGABYTE just very clearly knows more than it’s allowed to say.
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