Gigabyte confirms that Z490 will support Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake processors

During the company’s latest Aorus Direct live stream, a Gigabyte representative has confirmed that Intel’s Z490 chipset and LGA 1200 socket will support Intel’s 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors. Rocket Lake is the name of the series of processors which is due to succeed Intel’s newly announced Comet Lake CPUs, which is expected to launch sometime in 2021. 

We already know that many of Intel’s Z490 motherboards have been built with a little bit of futureproofing in mind, as most motherboard manufacturers have confirmed that their Z490 series motherboards feature a “PCIe 4.0 Hardware Design”. This suggests that Rocket Lake will support PCIe 4.0 and that some Z490 series motherboards will gain PCIe 4.0 support when Rocket Lake launches. 

Intel’s newly announced Comet Lake series processors do not support PCIe 4.0, making Z490’s PCIe 4.0 design completely useless at the time of writing. While future-proofing is nice to have, this move is designed to do one thing, lock consumers into the Intel ecosystem for longer. That said, having better upgrade options is always a perk. 

At 93 minutes and 28 seconds into the video below, one of Gigabyte’s hosts confirms that Z490 will support Intel’s future 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors with a simple “yes”. Intel probably didn’t want to announce that information right now, but now the information is public.