Intel is reportedly planning to move to yet another new socket for its next-gen gaming Us, meaning you would need a whole new motherboard to upgrade again. According to information found in shipping documents, the Intel Nova Lake platform will see the new Intel U ranges use the LGA1954 socket, rather than the LGA1851 socket used for its existing Arrow Lake Us.
That's potentially bad news if you've already bought the AMD Ryzen 5700X3D that was released in 2024.
The name of the new socket appears on NBD Data in the manifest for a shipment from India, which was shared by tech leaker Olrak29_ in a post on X (formerly Twitter), and which we've verified ourselves on the site too. The item being imported is a voltage regulator test tool for research and development (R&D), with two references to "LGA1954-NVL-S" appearing in the cargo description.
The "S" on the end usually denotes desktop Us in previous Intel codenames, while "NVL" looks very much like a contraction of Nova Lake, especially given that ARL-S was the shorthand for Arrow Lake desktop Us. Meanwhile, LGA (land grid array) is the standard prefix for Intel socket names, with the number afterward referring to the number of pins in the socket. As such, this shipping document strongly suggests that Intel Nova Lake uses a new LGA1954 socket.
This is a rumor that also ties in with speculation from much early leaks regarding Nova Lake. Back in August 2024, a Nova Lake rumor suggested that it would be the next desktop U range for Intel, as the company wouldn't be bringing its next-gen Panther Lake Us to the desktop.
There is hope for a future U upgrade for owners of existing LGA1851 motherboards, however. There are several rumors about an Intel Arrow Lake refresh, with these new Us potentially refining the existing architecture and working on current Intel motherboards.
If that's true, we'd expect Arrow Lake refresh Us to use the Core Ultra 300 naming scheme, with the range potentially topping out at the Core Ultra 9 385K, with Nova Lake then bringing us the Core Ultra 400 series, such as the Core Ultra 9 485K. As always with rumor and speculation, though, bear in mind that none of this has been officially confirmed by Intel.
Intel's current chips offer much-reduced power draw and operating temperatures compared to their Raptor Lake predecessors, but as I found in my AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to read about the benefits of this U's huge slice of 3D V-cache, which boosts gaming performance.
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