ASRock’s combo motherboard is perhaps a DRAM savior
With the worth of reminiscence persevering with to skyrocket, PC builders could also be pressured to get inventive. A brand new ASRock motherboard is perhaps one reply, with the power so as to add both DDR4 or DDR5 reminiscence by way of devoted reminiscence slots for both.
The ASRock H610m Combo — or, if curiosity rises, probably extra prefer it — gives a hedge towards the DRAM pricing apocalypse, as famous by UNIKO’s {Hardware} on Twitter and HotHardware. The corporate doesn’t point out any pricing, nevertheless.
Older DDR4 reminiscence is being phased out, lowering the obtainable provide and rising costs accordingly. That’s brought on costs to leap sharply: As famous by PCPartPicker, a pair of 16GB sticks of DDR4-3600 jumped from about $75 or so in June to only north of $225 in December, about tripling. However DDR-5 DRAM, snapped up by AI hyperscalers, has elevated from roughly $100 or so in September to about $380 — a sharper enhance by way of share, but additionally considerably extra {that a} client must pay out of pocket. The upshot is that the older, slower DDR4 reminiscence is perhaps a greater deal even when efficiency suffered considerably.
Sadly, DDR reminiscence isn’t backwards-compatible. When you can swap DDR4 reminiscence for a quicker DDR4 stick, you possibly can’t exchange DDR5 reminiscence with cheaper DDR4 reminiscence from an older PC. For this motherboard, you’d both must fill the board’s two slots of 64GB DDR4 reminiscence, or else populate the 4 DDR5 slots, with help as much as 96GB of reminiscence at DDR5-4800 speeds.
There’s additionally one other hitch: The board solely helps Intel’s Twelfth-gen to 14th-gen Core chips, that are arguably Intel’s hottest desktop processors, in keeping with what firm executives have mentioned, even with Intel’s historical past of crashing issues related to these chips.
All of it makes you suppose: Rival AMD’s AM4 platform has been well-known for its longevity, however AMD started shifting away from it with the rise of DDR5 reminiscence. If DDR4 reminiscence is being phased out but nonetheless stays cheaper than DDR5, will fans maintain on to these older PCs a bit longer? ASRock appears to be constructing in that path.
