“Asrock has announced BIOS updates for its Intel 600 series motherboards to support the soon-released Intel desktop processors,” reads the announcement. Asrock’s list covers Z690, H670, B660, and H610 chipset boards, several of which use DDR4 rather than 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 included both DDR4 and DDR5 variants.
The Asrock Z690 Aqua is one of the boards receiving a BIOS update 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 work on 600- and 700-series boards. AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, meanwhile, will only support DDR5. And while 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 board makers to quickly follow suit. Raptor Lake, expected in Q3 or Q4, will increase Alder Lake’s maximum number of Efficiency cores (Gracemont) to 16, bringing the total max core count to 24. The chips are also rumored to feature boost clocks that reach 5.8 GHz.
