Owl Noctua announced that in addition to the NH-L9a-AM4 thin cooler and NM-AM4-L9aL9i mounting fasteners, all of its AMD AM4-enabled CPU coolers and mounting fasteners also support the upcoming AM5 slot, and for the NM-AM4-L9aL9i mounting fasteners, Noctua will soon release the new NM-AM5-L9aL9i kit, which will be available for free at the end of October.
Officially, AM5 (LGA1718) is AMD’s upcoming slot for its next-generation Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) series processors. In short, all AM4-enabled Noctua coolers and mounting kits are directly upward compatible with the AM5 slot, with the exception of NH-L9a-AM4 and NM-AM4-L9aL9i.
With the exception of the NH-L9a-AM4 and NM-AM4-L9aL9i, all Noctua AM4 mounting kits directly match the threads of the standard AM4 stock backplate. Since these backplane threads and their specifications are the same on AM4 and AM5, AM4 mounts that attach to standard AMD backplanes also support AM5.
This means that all SE-AM4 models purchased from January 2019 onwards, as well as all Noctua multi-slot coolers, directly support the AM5 slot. Users who have upgraded to an AM4 multi-socket cooler with the NM-AM4 or NM-AM4-UxS kits purchased prior to this date will not need to do any upgrades either. Using these upgrade kits, it is possible to make older multi-socket coolers purchased before 2019 that have not been upgraded to AM4 compatible with AM5. For identification purposes, the NM-AM4 or NM-AM4-UxS kits will be renamed NM-AM5/4-MP83 (for radiators with 83mm mounting pitch) and NM-AM5/4-MP78 (for radiators with 78mm mounting pitch).
The NH-L9a-AM4 and NM-AM4-L9aL9i are not compatible with AM5 because they require replacing the standard AMD backplane with a custom AMD backplane, which is not possible on AM5. Therefore, Noctua has introduced the new NM-AM5-L9aL9i mounting kit, which will enable the NH-L9a, NH-L9a-AM4 and NH-L9i coolers to be upgraded to AM5. NH-L9i-17xx is not available because it has been technically customized for the different height specifications of the LGA17xx platform. As with the other installation kits, the NM-AM5-L9aL9i will be available for free through Noctua.at (starting in late October). We plan to release the new model NH-L9a heatsink with the AM5 mounting kit already included in the first quarter of 2023.
