News, Reviews & Betas which includes large community peer support Intel launched its 12th gen Alder Lake-S desktop CPUs recently which are compatible with both DDR5 and DDR4 boards. In this article, we try to summarise what the pros and cons of each platform are.
Intel’s latest 12th gen Alder Lake micro-architecture is exciting for enthusiasts. Irrespective of its performance against its predecessors or AMD’s competing Ryzen CPUs, the new generation of Intel processors is landing with a fundamentally new design that has not been seen before in the x86 space. The architecture is introducing the big. LITTLE approach (Intel calls it Big-Bigger), which is an extremely popular way of designing mobile phone SoCs where larger more powerful cores are combined with smaller more efficient ones to get the optimal performance out of a microprocessor. Not just that, the Alder Lake also brings cutting-edge next-gen features that include PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5 / LPDDR5 memory support. Essentially Alder Lake’s integrated memory controller (IMC) is ready for the fifth generation of double data rate (DDR) SDRAM but it is also compatible with last-gen DDR4 as well. As default spec, Intel states that the Alder Lake-S desktop CPUs would work with DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200, but higher speeds should work fine too. Although both DDR4 and DDR5 memory standards have the same 288 pin count, the pinout and keying are different which means the 600-series chipset-based motherboards accompanying Alder Lake-S, will come in two flavors as motherboard vendors will offer both DDR5 and DDR4 variants. Hence, folks looking to build an Alder Lake-S system will have to choose one over the other. To help distinguish, the DDR4 boards are labeled as such. Here are a few examples of Z690 boards both DDR4 and DDR5: In this article, we lay down the benefits of each of the two platforms and hope to help readers best decide what’s right for their next Alder Lake-S PC. We start off with DDR5, which is the latest and greatest offering in the case of desktop DRAM and go through some of the new features and advantages it has to offer: The most obvious advantage for having DDR5 memory over DDR4 is the higher speed and the additional memory bandwidth which will be on offer.
