Noctua is giving customers free mounting kit for upcoming LGA1700 socket
Noctua will provide free mounting kits to allow customers to use their CPU coolers with Intel’s yet-to-be-announced LGA1700 socket. Multi-socket coolers will soon be equipped with mounting kits for LGA1700 as standard.
Noctua will provide the mounting kits when LGA1700 motherboards and associated Intel Alder Lake processors go on sale. There is no official date for that yet. Noctua will also sell the kits separately from mid-October, for users who don’t want to wait. To qualify for a free kit, users must provide proof of purchase of their Noctua cooler and LGA1700 processor or motherboard.
Intel Alder Lake processor
The company says that mounting kits for the LGA1700 socket will be available for all coolers sold since 2005, allowing even 15-year-old coolers to be used. The only exception are the coolers from the NH-L9i series, because according to Noctua they cannot be made compatible with the new socket. Therefore, the company will release new versions of these coolers for the LGA1700 socket in October.
Other coolers will be equipped with a mounting kit for the new socket between now and October. Some models already come with a mounting kit, others will follow in the coming months.
Intel LGA1700 diagrams
The LGA1700 socket has not been officially announced yet. However, various details have already been leaked, including via Intel’s own website. For example, it is known that the hole pattern for mounting the CPU cooler will be different. That is 78x78mm instead of 75x75mm. The socket is also less high than the current generation of Intel sockets.
Intel is rumored to release the first Alder Lake CPUs in October or November. It would concern a few models and only high-end Z690 motherboards. More variants and more chipsets would follow in early 2022. The fact that Noctua will start offering the mounting kits in October makes it plausible that these rumors are correct.
It is not the first time that Noctua has offered free mounting kits for new processors. In its own words, the company has been doing this since the introduction of the AM2 socket in 2006. Various other manufacturers also do this, for example when AMD introduced the AM4 socket. Noctua is the first manufacturer to share LGA1700 upgrade kit details.