Previous reports already indicated that Intel will begin increasing socket pins at Meteor Lake. This is now confirmed news, although the essential pin numbers are not replaced by LGA2551 as earlier ru... Intel Arrow Lake-S and Meteor Lake-Socket wil be LGA 1851
i get no giggles out of saying "i told you so", especially as changing the pins is something AMD is doing this time around as well. the good news is most coolers will work with this, a few may need some (cheap) hardware. and another good thing to bear in mind (i'm talking AM 5 as well) is you need damn good cooling. not "just" because of TDP... these are incredibly dense circuits and depending on TIM may well be prone to hot-spotting. a lot of folks know the R9 5950X requires either a loop/aio or humongous air. ML & AM 5 will be worse. Intel fans looking to stay air cooled would be well recommended to buy the I-5 and stay away from the I-7 and I-9 (desktop cpus)
Well i may have to warm up to AIO cooling by then, as of right now still scared of it leaking, and in general not sure how would cope to my 24/7 usage that i typically do Hence why went with Arctic Freezer 7x cooling for my Intel 10700 for now, but in future guess i'll have no choice to take the leap into an AIO with future I7 upgrade, as use the system for light video editing, gaming, music listening, and light DJing tasks, never used an I5 processor, went from an AMD FX 8310 to I7 7700 in 2017, and From I7 7700 to I7 10700 in June 2020.
don't worry (as much). aio's today are better than they've ever been. not so much in their cooling (all are +/- 5c of each other with 2 exceptions) but in the reliability and quality of construction. both Arctic and EVGA have inexpensive aio's (w/o rgb) that cool as well as sub-$200 EKWB aio