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

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.

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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