A few months in advance of the release of AMD’s Ryzen processors, Noctua told its customers that if they wanted a free AM4 mounting kit for their existing Noctua cooler, they were free to request one. Now, the company is doing the same thing for Intel’s upcoming X299 platform, codenamed Basin Falls, which is expected to be unveiled at Computex in late May or early June.
The X299 platform will complement two different processor families, and is in effect a merging of the mainstream platform with the enthusiast one. Kaby Lake-X chips are going to be a successor to Kaby Lake (as the name implies), but isn’t targeted at enthusiasts (like the X implies). It’ll still have a dual-channel memory controller, whereas Skylake-X will stick to the quad-channel design that has been available on Intel enthusiast platforms since Sandy Bridge-E’s launch (2011).
There are a handful of reasons to get excited for this unveil, but one of the best features of the X299 platform has nothing to do with the chips. Instead, it has to do with the little fact that X299 sticks to the LGA2011 mount, meaning that despite Intel calling the new mount LGA2066, it adheres to the specifications of LGA2011. If you have an LGA2011 cooler kicking around, you should be able to use it on X299 without issue.
The free upgrade kit Noctua offers to upgrade you to LGA2066 is the same LGA2011 kit that has been available for quite some time. The company says that this kit is compatible with almost all of its coolers, with the NH-L9i and NH-L9a being the exceptions.
In order to qualify for a free mounting kit, you need to scan or photograph the receipt from your purchase of your Noctua cooler (and X299 motherboard), or if you don’t have those (given X299 boards are not available yet), a photo of the cooler itself with your name written on a piece of paper next to it would suffice. Alternatively, if you don’t want the hassle of submitting documents, the kit can be purchased online for a nominal fee (~7 USD).