Intel 12th Gen Introduces DDR5 Motherboards

With the release of DDR5 RAM first showing earlier this year, 12th generation Intel has finally introduced boards that support it.

Intel has released the first DDR5 supported motherboards for their 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs. Alder lake is built using their new Intel 7 process, which is a 10nm chip after years of 14nm chips. This is still higher than AMD’s current 7nm chipset that they have had since 2nd gen Ryzen, and AMD plans to move to 5nm for their Zen 4 CPU range.

So far the benchmarks and comparisons have mostly looked at the Intel Core i9-12900k and the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, and while the Intel has shown better performance, this isn’t a useful comparison considering 12th gen Intel is 2 generations higher than 5th gen AMD. While intel has focused on pushing out a new generation every year, AMD is instead focusing on spending more time on creating a better product.

DDR5 Speeds

The base speed of DDR5 RAM starts at 4800mhz which is considerably higher than DDR4’s standard gaming speeds of 3200-3600mhz. When looking at the high end Intel 12th gen Z690 motherboards, such as the ASUS ROG Maxmus Z690 Extreme, the maximum supported speeds on DDR5 is 6400Mhz.

While the boards and CPUs are available here in SA, the RAM is still slow to enter the country, and any DDR5 RAM that does become available here will be quite pricey in the early days. If you are wanting to upgrade to a DDR5 machine, it would be best to wait for the release of the Zen 4 CPUs at the end of 2023, and by then DDR5 RAM will be more affordable as well.