Biostar is the first manufacturer to officially confirm support for Intel’s 11th Generation Rocket Lake CPUs on its Z490 line of motherboards. The card manufacturer posted the announcement, confirming support for the upcoming desktop processors on its Z490 Racing series motherboards.
Biostar Brings 11th Generation Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU Support to its Z490 Motherboard Line
All five Z490 Racing motherboards have been listed with support for Intel’s 11th generation Rocket Lake desktop CPU. These cards include the following:
- Z490 GTA
- Z490 GTA EVO
- Z490 GTN
- Z490A-Silver
- Z490T-Silver
There appears to be no new BIOS listed on the motherboard support page, which may suggest that the chips will work right away, but for those who want to achieve the most stable performance when running an Intel Rocket Lake CPU, it is advisable to continue checking the support page to see if a BIOS is available for download for the Z490 motherboard.
Biostar also recently enabled resizable BAR or Re-BAR support on its Intel 400 series line. This allows Intel CPUs to access the entire memory buffer that modern AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have to offer. Currently, the resizable BAR from Biostar works perfectly with AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, but expects it to also be enabled with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards, once the drivers are released from the manufacturer.
As seen by Momomo_US, ASRock also listed support for Intel’s 11th generation Rocket Lake CPUs for its own Z490 motherboards. The Z490 Aqua, which is the flagship of the manufacturer’s Z490 cards, is now listed with support for Rocket Lake CPU and several other Z490 cards as well.
Here’s everything we know about 11th generation desktop CPUs
Intel’s Rocket Lake-S desktop CPU platform will be supported on the LGA 1200 socket, which made its debut with 10th generation Comet Lake-S CPUs, albeit on 400 series motherboards. Intel Rocket Lake-S processors will be released primarily for 500 series motherboards, but it has been confirmed that LGA 1200 motherboards will support Rocket Lake-S CPUs, especially considering the fact that PCIe Gen 4.0 is an important feature of Z490 motherboards that they would only be enabled using Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs. Motherboard manufacturers, especially ASUS, will be paying extra attention by incorporating hardware-level integration of PCIe Gen 4 into their Z590 line of motherboards compared to their Z490 line, as we point out here.
Key features of Intel’s Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs include:
- Higher performance with Cypress Cove’s new flagship architecture
- Up to 8 cores and 16 threads (double-digit IPC gains over Skylake)
- New Xe graphics architecture (up to 50% higher performance than Gen9)
- Increased 3200 MHz DDR4 memory support
- PCIe 4.0 CPU ranges (available on Z490 and Z590 motherboards)
- Enhanced display (integrated HDMI 2.0b, DP1.4a, HBR3)
- Added PCIe x4 lanes on the CPU = 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes on the total CPU
- Advanced media (12-bit AV1 / HVEC, E2E compression)
- CPU Attached Storage or Intel Optane Memory
- New features and overclocking capabilities
- USB audio download
- Integrated CNVi and Wireless-AX
- USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20G) integrated
- 2.5 Gb discrete Ethernet LAN
- Discreet Intel Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 compatible)
The architecture for Rocket Lake CPUs is Cypress Cove, which is a hybrid between the design of Sunny Cove and Willow Cove, but will feature the Xe Gen 12 GPU architecture. Intel’s Core i9-11900K will be the car- head of the line and we expect more information soon. The Intel 500 series motherboard platform, for now, is expected to hit stores on January 11.
11th generation Rocket Lake Desktop CPU line specifications (preliminaries):
| CPU name | Colors / Threads | Base Clock | Boost Clock (1-Core) | Boost Clock (All-Core) | Cache | Graphics | TDP (PL1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core i9-11900K | 8/16 | 3.50 GHz | 5.30 GHz | 4.80 GHz | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 125W |
| Core i9-11900 | 8/16 | 1.80 GHz | 4.40 GHz | 3.80 GHz | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 65W |
| Core i9-11900T | 8/16 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 35W |
| Core i7-11700K | 8/16 | TBC | 5.00 GHz | 4.60 GHz | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 125W |
| Core i7-11700 | 8/16 | 2.50 GHz | 4.90 GHz | TBC | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 65W |
| Core i7-11700T | 8/16 | TBC | TBC | 16 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 35W | |
| Core i5-11600K | 6/12 | TBC | 4.90 GHz | 4.60 GHz | 12 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 125W |
| Core i5-11600 | 6/12 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 12 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 65W |
| Core i5-11600T | 6/12 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 12 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 35W |
| Core i5-11500 | 6/12 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 12 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 65W |
| Core i5-11500T | 6/12 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 12 MB | Intel Xe 32 EU (256 cores) | 35W |
| Core i5-11400 | 6/12 | 2.60 GHz | 4,400 GHz | 4.20 GHz | 12 MB | Intel Xe 24 EU (192 colors) | 65W |
| Core i5-11400T | 6/12 | TBC | TBC | TBC | 12 MB | Intel Xe 24 EU (192 colors) | 35W |