What just happened? It looks like Asrock wants to lead the way when it comes to getting ready for Raptor Lake. Intel’s new processors won’t arrive until later this year, but the Taiwanese company has already announced BIOS updates for its 600-series motherboards that support 13th-generation CPUs. And since some of these boards use DDR4, Asrock has confirmed that Intel will continue to support the memory type instead of going down AMD’s Zen 4 path and switching to just DDR5.
“Asrock has announced BIOS updates for its Intel 600 series motherboards to support the upcoming Intel desktop processors,” reads the Announcement†
Asrock’s list includes Z690, H670, B660 and H610 chipset cards, several of which use DDR4 instead of DDR5, confirming the memory type’s compatibility with Raptor Lake. This comes after a leaked list of Asrock’s flagship Z790 and mid-range H770 motherboards featured both DDR4 and DDR5 variants.
Raptor Lake’s support for DDR4 was always expected. The upcoming processors share the same LGA 1700 socket as Alder Lake, and both generations of CPUs will run on 600 and 700 series boards. AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, meanwhile, only supports DDR5. And while the prices of the newer memory are falling, the modules remain more expensive than their DDR4 counterparts.
Asrock’s early announcement is likely a marketing ploy that makes it one of the first ‘Raptor Lake ready’ companies – expect other boardmakers to follow suit soon.
Raptor Lake, expected in the third or fourth quarter, will increase Alder Lake’s maximum number of Efficiency cores (Gracemont) to 16, bringing the total number of cores to 24. The chips would also have boost clocks reaching 5.8GHz.
