Written by Metal Messiah

If you have been following the latest roadmap of INTEL Core series of processors, and the new platform they are based on, then you might have noticed that many motherboard vendors have been claiming that their Z490-series of Motherboards have full hardware support for the PCI 4.0 standard.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but before you get your hopes high, let me remind you that the current COMET LAKE-S series of processors do not support the PCI-e 4.0 interface. Even the new flagship CPU, the i9-10900K lacks support for anything higher then PCIe 3.0. The PCIe 4.0 support on Z490 is a feature reserved for future processors from Intel.

Now, one representative from Gigabyte during a live stream has confirmed that these Z490 motherboards will indeed have support for the next-gen upcoming series of Core processors, aka Rocket Lake-S.

Intel Rocket Lake-S is expected to launch later this year. This makes sense since Rocket lake will have support for the PCI 4.0 standard, so that’s why all the motherboard vendors have been advertising that their boards are PCI-4.0-ready.

GIGABYTE has actually already claimed that their Z490 motherboards feature a “PCIe 4.0 Hardware Design”. So this obviously hints at a support for the next-gen of CPUs from INTEL, since Comet Lake does not support PCI-express 4.0 standard.

Basically, it looks the company has built its Z490 series motherboards with PCIe 4.0 in mind, using additional PCB layers, and PCIe 4.0 compatible devices (such as PCIe slots, clock generators) to offer support for the 11’th gen Rocket Lake-S lineup.

Several Motherboard vendors have been publishing marketing materials regarding the readiness for PCI-Express Gen 4.0. ASUS, ASROCK, and MSI have also hinted support for the PCI 4.0 feature, apart from Gigabyte.

Now it is confirmed that Z490 will support Rocket Lake-S. This also means that RL-S is using the same LGA1200 socket. So Intel is giving some sort of forward compatibility to gamers.

This hints that Intel has plans to release future LGA 1200 processors with PCIe 4.0 support. Though, there hasn’t been any official confirmation from INTEL yet, as to whether they plan to support the socket LGA 1200 for the next-gen CPU lineup as well.

Thanks Andreas Schilling