What is the Difference Between All the Defferent Intel Chipsets?

[NewYorksFinest]

I can name a few: Z87, H87, H81, B85, etc. What is the difference?

 

[Essence_of_War]

Features.

All 8-series chipsets support the LGA 1150 chips (Only Haswell right now)

Z87 chipsets are the only ones that allow multiplier overclocking of unlocked 'k' series processors. Generally supports SLI/Xfire, but might depend on specific MoBo model.

H87 is almost identical to Z87 except no multiplier OC'ing.

H81 is a budget chipset. No RST, SRT. Only 2 DIMMs. No SLI/Xfire support. Only 2x Sata 6Gb/s ports.

Q87/Q85/B85 are business chipsets. Q87 supports vPro, virutalization, and a laundry list of other instruction sets and special features like RST/SRT. Q85 supports just SIPP I think, and I think B85 supports none (or almost none) of that.

You can look at them side-by-side here:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/75013,75004,75016,75007,75019,75010

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Z = overclocking
H = home use
B = Business
Q = Quality Business (Workstations and stuff.)

Within a series, bigger numbers are better.

Wikipedia has a nice feature breakdown of these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_chipsets#LGA_1150

 

[Morbus]

Their naming scheme is actually quite nice and easy to understand.