It looks like a list of upcoming ASUS motherboards based on the Intel Z690 chipset has hit the Euasian Economic Commission (EEC). While we sort of expected what ASUS’s Z690 lineup would look like what we see here does tell us a little more about DDR4 and DDR5 support. Intel’s upcoming “Alder Lake” 12 generation core desktop processors will actually support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. It appears ASUS will be offer both a DDR4 and DDR5 variant of many of their motherboards.
Looking at the motherboards listed on the EEC website we have the usual suspects like ROG Maximus, ROG Strix, TUF Gaming, Prime, and ProArt boards. The interesting thing is that we see two versions of many of these boards. There is a Prime Z690-A as well as a Prime Z690-A D4 where the “D4” demarks the DDR4 version. The normal Prime Z690-A will only support DDR5 memory. We can also see that ASUS’s high-end ROG Maximus XIV series lacks any D4 variants, so those will be DDR5 exclusives.
Back when Intel’s 6th generation “Skylake” processors were launching we were transitioning from DDR3 to DDR4 and the processors support both, but most motherboard manufacturers went the DDR4 route. This time with hardware prices where they are the easier thing to do is offer two variants of the same motherboard, one that supports DDR4 and another that supports DDR5.
