Intel has confirmed that the B460 and H410 chipset-based motherboards won’t be getting support for 11th Gen Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs and that only the H470 and Z490 chipset-based motherboards will be compatible with Rocket Lake-S Desktop CPUs.
On Intel’s official support page, it states that motherboards based on the Intel B460 and the H410 chipsets are not compatible with Intel’s 11th Gen Desktop CPUs. However, Intel’s 11th Gen CPUs come with both Rocket Lake and Comet Lake Refresh flavors. And the B460 and the H410 chipsets will have support for 11th Gen Comet Lake Refresh CPUs which will include Celeron, Pentium, and Core i3 CPUs.
Currently, Intel has provided no information on why the entry-level and budget chipset motherboards are not getting compatibility for the 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs. But it could be due to the inadequate power delivery on the entry-level boards. Only the Z490 & H470 offerings are seemingly good enough to support the Rocket Lake chips.
However, this does not mean we will not get to see some sort of unofficial Rocket Lake CPU support from board vendors. It is possible that an unofficial BIOS support will be offered which would enable Rocket Lake CPU on these entry-level motherboards.
Another reason why Intel is not offering support to the B460 and the H410 chipsets with the upcoming 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs may be due to the arrival of new 500 series chipsets which include B560 and H510 chipsets. . Intel’s B560 chipset has a few key advantages over its predecessor, offering memory overclocking and more PCIe I/O (Gen 4). The H510 series boards will pack WiFi6 support along with minor firmware updates as well.
The 11th Gen Intel Rocket Lake CPU series will be hitting the market in late March this year. We will have to wait and see how consumers react to this news.
