Intel Z590, B560 and H510 motherboard platform to be launched at CES 2021
In Q1 2021, Intel is expected to release Rocket Lake, the new 11th generation of desktop processors, still using 14nm manufacturing process, but with a new architecture, PCIe 4.0 and probably much higher single-threaded and gaming performance. According to rumors, the CPU launch should be in March, but it looks like the platform with new motherboards, such as B560, Z590, etc. could be released sooner, as early as a few days from now.
Rocket Lake processors use the same LGA 1200 socket as current Comet Lake chips and are supposed to work on boards with 400-series chipsets as long as you have the appropriate BIOS upgrade. After all, many of those boards support PCIe 4.0 in advance for this very reason. But Intel is also readying new 500-series chipsets for the new CPUs, and new motherboards should also be available for sale supporting Rocket Lake “out of the box”. Information on those has started to trickle in, and if the latest gossip isn’t wrong, these boards could even start selling before the CPUs themselves.
Poster on chinese social network WeChat (it reached us on the west via a Twitter account) Harukaze5719 and VideoCardz) has leaked that Intel should officially unveil and even allegedly launch these motherboards (or at least the chipsets) on January 11th. The CES 2021 event in its virtual form officially begins that day, so the platform for Rocket Lake could be introduced as part of the announcements Intel has prepared for the event.
However, the processors are not supposed to be released at that time, for the report actually directly states that they are still planned for release at the beginning of March or at best the end of February. The new boards would thus be released in advance of the CPUs. This isn’t something that’d pose problems – the bords can be used with the 10th generation of CPUs too, and this way compatible boards will be readily available on the day the new processors are released.
But there is also some possibility that the January 11 release turns out to be a paper launch and in reality the 500-series boards would only reach stores with some delay. This possibility is not not entirely unlikely as there have not been many leaks of motherboards with these new chipsets so far. The stated introduction date is just some two weeks away and in the past, photos of motherboards, catalog listings or at least names would typically be leaking up to some two months prior to a product launch (which has not particularly played out yet, this time).
DDR4 overclock on B560, Superspeed USB 20Gbps
According to the report on WeChat, the Z590 chipset boards (which will be the successor to the Z490 generation with overclocking support), and at least the B560 and H510 chipset boards are to be included in the january unveiling, meaning that the lower price tiers should be covered right from the start as well.
According to previous leaks, the B560 platform should gain the ability to raise the DDR4 frequency above the officially supported level, either viaXMP profile or by direct overclocking. This is something that proved limiting on the current B460 chipset, and with this change the B560 should be quite a bit better platform for gaming PCs. Core i7 and i9 processors have relatively little room for manual OC these days, so RAM overclocking and possibly a TDP increase on a B560 board might actually be enough to get near-perfect gaming performance even if B560 won’t allow you to change the CPU’s multiplier.
We don’t know yet for certain if the B560-series boards will also support PCI Express 4.0. We assume it will since lack of PCIe 4.0 would harm their competitiveness vis-a-vis the AMD B550 platform. PCIe 4.0 could however be missing in the cheapest boards using the H510 chipset (the same is true with AMD A520). As for other news about these chipsets, we saw reports that the Intel 500-series chipsets should be the first to support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with speeds of up to 20 Gb/s. HDMI 2.0 output from integrated GPU should also finally work with Rocket Lake processors.
English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi
