Intel’s next LGA1851 Socket Revealed?
Intel LGA1851 Socket
Having only just written about AMD and their lengthy support for their socket, it’s time to look at potentially what Intel has in store. Famously Intel only keep a socket around for a generation or two, and how great/annoying this is depends very much upon your desire to remain futureproofed and/or have the latest at all times.
The 13th Generation of Intel CPUs really pushed the boat out in terms of clock speed and features, with support for PCI Express 5.0, DDR5, as well as a refinement of their concept of both Efficient and Performance Cores. These give you the best of both worlds, where you can have the Performance cores running at a high speed for the gaming tasks, whilst the Efficient cores handle low power tasks, or step in when you’re really wringing the neck of your rig for maximum performance in thread heavy applications.
Igor’s Lab, a site famed for getting the details right long before they are public knowledge, has spotted some of the elements that will be of interest to the average user. He also goes into way more detail than the layperson could need, and if you’re interested in all that you can read about it here.
For us there are three elements that have piqued our interest. Firstly, and somewhat obviously if you understand Intel’s naming conventions, the LGA1851 has 151 more pins than the LGA1700 which came before it, and these are going to be focused upon providing more PCI Express 5.0 lanes so that you can run your GPU at the full x16 speed whilst also supplying your Gen 5 M.2 with a full amount of bandwidth. Currently not even the AMD AM5 socket supplies both M.2 and GPU with all the PCI Express bandwidth they can utilise.
Perhaps most importantly the dynamic pressure that can be applied to the physical socket itself has near-doubled, up to 923N from the LGA1700s 489N. The physical size of the socket hasn’t changed from LGA1700, but this huge pressure increase does mean that you’ll require a new cooler mounting assembly, and perhaps even a new cooler itself. We’ve heard about some isolated cases of the LGA1700 socket not withstanding highly pressed cooling assemblies, so Intel must be confident they’ve solved those issues if they are expecting everyone to have a cooler clamped twice as tightly.
Of course, full information will be available next year as we move towards the Z890 chipset and LGA1851 socket processors, but it’s worth bearing in mind if you’re thinking of a full-blown system overhaul when the 14th Generation of Intel CPUs launches later this year.
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