Intel officially denies the compatibility of the new 11. generation desktop CPUs (Rocket Lake) on motherboards with B460 and H410 chipset

Intel has announced that the 11. It is expected that the 3rd generation Rocket Lake desktop CPUs will not be compatible with the existing B460 and H410 based motherboards. According to Intel, the new CPUs will only be officially supported on Z490 & H470 motherboards, while the more budget-oriented offerings will have to stay out. However, confusion may be caused by the fact that the 11. Intel’s 3rd generation CPUs will be based on two SKU variants, Rocket Lake and Comet Lake Refresh. 

On the official support page, Intel states that motherboards based on the Intel B460 & H410 chipsets are not compatible with Rocket Lake. However, the entry-level 400-series motherboards will offer support for the Comet Lake refresh CPUs, which include Celeron, Pentium and even parts of the new Core i3, but for all Core i5, Core i7 and Core i9 on the other hand will not. The reasons for this, however, are mostly rather flimsy, even if one can still follow a few arguments.

Plausible is for example the fact that these entry-level boards could have too weak voltage converters in contrast to the more expensive Z490 and H470 boards. But the past has also shown that some manufacturers will at least offer unofficial Rocket Lake CPU support (ASRock?). So it’s quite possible that at least an unofficial BIOS support will be offered, which will also let the Rocket-Lake CPUs run on such boards, but just without guarantee that everything will work properly and stably.

However, a more valid reason could be that Intel is simply trying to push its 500-series platform in this way, which was recently presented at CES 2021 and of which some motherboards are already available in stores. Intel’s B560 chipset does offer a few key advantages over its predecessor, however, such as memory overclocking and enhanced PCIe I/O (Gen 4). The H510 series boards will also feature WiFi6 support along with minor firmware updates.