Intel is reportedly planning to move to yet another new socket for its upcoming next-gen gaming CPUs, 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 CPU ranges use the LGA1954 socket, rather than the LGA1851 socket used for its existing Arrow Lake CPUs.
That’s potentially bad news if you’ve already bought the best gaming motherboard you can afford for a new Intel Arrow Lake CPU, as it suggests you’ll need to upgrade the whole lot again if you want to move to Nova Lake later. Comparatively, Intel’s previous LGA1700 socket lasted three generations, from 12th-gen Alder Lake to 13th and 14th-gen Raptor Lake, while AMD’s AM4 socket lasted an incredibly long time, with even some first-gen Ryzen boards from 2017 still able to run the new 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 CPUs 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 CPUs. 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 CPU range for Intel, as the company wouldn’t be bringing its next-gen Panther Lake CPUs to the desktop.
There is hope for a future CPU upgrade for owners of existing LGA1851 motherboards, however. There are several rumors about an Intel Arrow Lake refresh, with these new CPUs potentially refining the existing architecture and working on current Intel motherboards.
If that’s true, we’d expect Arrow Lake refresh CPUs 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 Core Ultra 7 265K review, they struggle for peak performance – especially when it comes to gaming – compared to Intel’s previous CPUs and the competition from AMD. If you want the best gaming CPU you can buy at the moment, take a read of my AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to read about the benefits of this CPU’s huge slice of 3D V-cache, which boosts gaming performance.
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