Intel's upcoming Z970 and Z990 flagship chipsets will reportedly consume up to 14W at peak load, courtesy of more PCIe 5.0 support — Nova Lake motherboards may feature a 22% smaller PCH than Z890

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The physical die and package size have shrunk compared to current-gen offerings.

Intel 12th Generation Alder Lake CPU
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel's next-gen Nova Lake family is expected to land on a new socket, but it will also bring forth a bunch of new chipsets with it. We've already covered them before, but new details have surfaced about the flagship offerings: Z970 and Z990. Both of these will allegedly feature the same PCH that's 22% smaller but more power-hungry than the current-gen Z890 platform, consuming up to 14W at the top-end when fully saturated.

Before we discuss that, a low-resolution picture of the Z990 PCH has also been leaked, with Jaykhin claiming it measures out to 25 x 24mm for the package, while featuring an 11.15 x 6.5mm die. That comes out to 72.5mm² for the die area, while we're looking at 600mm² for the package area. For comparison, Z890's package area was 658mm², and the die area would work out to 92.9mm², constituting a 22% shrinkage for the die and an 8.8% smaller overall package.

This is despite the higher power draw suggested for Z990, which is 14W. However, the platform will only hit that upper limit when running multiple PCIe 5.0 devices simultaneously; otherwise, the base power for the Z990 PCH is just 7.9W — still 1.9W more than the 6W base power of Z890. Even the cut-down Z970 apparently features a 6.4W base power draw. Both chipsets have the same maximum operating temperature of 113°C, 5 degrees higher than Z890.

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When you have just a single GPU slotted in the motherboard, it's wired up directly to the CPU and doesn't use any of the downstream PCIe lanes stemming from the chipset. The same goes for a single PCIe 5.0 drive for Z970 and up to two PCIe 5.0 SSDs for Z990. But the moment you add more PCIe 5.0 devices, they're routed through the chipset, which makes it consume more power to maintain signal integrity.

We haven't officially seen any LGA 1954 motherboard yet, but there were some early prototypes at Computex, which is where the leaked PCH image could've come from. Anyhow, Nova Lake is expected to carry up to 52 cores at the top-end, so it makes sense such powerful motherboards are required to handle the silicon. Previous rumors have pointed toward an insane 700W PL4 for the flagship NVL-S part with dual compute tiles.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    The article said:
    the base power for the Z990 PCH is just 7.9W — still 1.9W more than the 6W base power of Z890.
    That's not ideal, but still better than AMD's recent chipsets.

    Does anyone know what manufacturing node they're made on?
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    Does anyone know what manufacturing node they're made on?
    I've never seen anything mentioned other than 14nm with relation to Z690-Z890. It's hard to say whether or not there was any node shrink here, but I'd lean towards probably not.

    I could potentially see PCIe 5.0 signal integrity costing more power even though the lane count is halved. The base power figure also seems to include bt/wifi which the prior did not. It's hard to gauge whether or not these would be enough to push the base power up despite less connectivity being counted in the figure.
    Reply
  • endocine
    Promontory 21 uses 7W max, 2 on a X870E for 14W at 105C tjmax, intels new chipset is definitely hotter and more power hungry, and the trend towards hotter and more power is not good
    Reply
  • bit_user
    endocine said:
    Promontory 21 uses 7W max, 2 on a X870E for 14W at 105C tjmax,
    Okay, I don't have evidence to the contrary, but was disappointed to see my 9600X idle at 45W to 50W (at the wall) on a B650M board with only iGPU graphics. The only fan was the CPU fan. 2x sticks of DDR5-6000 (otherwise, JEDEC timings). One PCIe 4.0 SSD. PSU was 750W 80+ Titanium efficiency.
    Reply
  • Li Ken-un
    bit_user said:
    PSU was 750W 80+ Titanium efficiency
    A fellow efficiency connoisseur 🙂
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Li Ken-un said:
    A fellow efficiency connoisseur 🙂
    Ugh, but that story didn't end well.
    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/random-shutdowns-when-idle-is-it-the-motherboard-or-the-psu.3893563/
    Note that the above thread references a different system. I had moved the PSU from my Ryzen box, because I planned to put a dGPU in the 9600X machine and so I equipped it with a 1000W PSU I also had.
    Reply
  • Skramblr
    I'm wondering why this is a big deal? If you are a power user and fill up all the PCIe lanes and max them out, your probably a >1000W computer user and wouldn't care about a 7W increase on a chipset. You NEED that performance. If you build a basic PC with one drive and a video card, you're likely back down to normal power levels. Its not like this Intel chipset exceeds the power levels seen with AMD?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Skramblr said:
    If you build a basic PC with one drive and a video card, you're likely back down to normal power levels.
    The article said that Z990 uses 31.7% more power than Z890, at idle.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    Okay, I don't have evidence to the contrary, but was disappointed to see my 9600X idle at 45W to 50W (at the wall) on a B650M board with only iGPU graphics.
    TPU's last testing that included an APU showed the 8500G at 14W lower total system idle power than the next closest AM5 (9600X). That would point towards the IO die being the source even though it's not apples to apples exactly. There are more lanes on the 9600X which would mean 16 instead of 8 and PCIe 5.0 vs 4.0 but when idle that is usually dropped to minimum.

    That being said I cannot find a single official source for Promontory 21 power consumption. All of the 7W mentions I saw went back to a singular leak though it does seem like a reasonable figure.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Skramblr said:
    I'm wondering why this is a big deal? If you are a power user and fill up all the PCIe lanes and max them out, your probably a >1000W computer user and wouldn't care about a 7W increase on a chipset. You NEED that performance. If you build a basic PC with one drive and a video card, you're likely back down to normal power levels. Its not like this Intel chipset exceeds the power levels seen with AMD?
    While they're not huge numbers a lot of us like running things efficiently for whatever the circumstance is. Intel's power consumption does seem to be increasing across the board from base to load. Now it's entirely possible that base for chipsets means the same thing as processor which is an in use not idle measurement, but without official information one can't say until it's tested.
    Reply