Image: ASROCK
With the price of memory continuing to skyrocket, PC builders may be forced to get creative. A new ASRock motherboard might be one answer, with the ability to add either DDR4 or DDR5 memory via dedicated memory slots for either.
The ASRock H610m Combo — or, if interest rises, potentially more like it — offers a hedge against the DRAM pricing apocalypse, as noted by UNIKO’s Hardware on Twitter and HotHardware. The company doesn’t mention any pricing, however.
Older DDR4 memory is being phased out, reducing the available supply and increasing prices accordingly. That’s caused prices to jump sharply: As noted by PCPartPicker, a pair of 16GB sticks of DDR4-3600 jumped from about $75 or so in June to just north of $225 in December, about tripling. But DDR-5 DRAM, snapped up by AI hyperscalers, has increased from roughly $100 or so in September to about $380 — a sharper increase in terms of percentage, but also substantially more that a consumer would have to pay out of pocket. The upshot is that the older, slower DDR4 memory might be a better deal even if performance suffered somewhat.
Unfortunately, DDR memory isn’t backwards-compatible. While you can swap DDR4 memory for a faster DDR4 stick, you can’t replace DDR5 memory with cheaper DDR4 memory from an older PC. For this motherboard, you’d either have to fill the board’s two slots of 64GB DDR4 memory, or else populate the four DDR5 slots, with support up to 96GB of memory at DDR5-4800 speeds.
There’s also another hitch: The board only supports Intel’s 12th-gen to 14th-gen Core chips, which are arguably Intel’s most popular desktop processors, according to what company executives have said, even with Intel’s history of crashing problems associated with those chips.
It all makes you think: Rival AMD’s AM4 platform has been famous for its longevity, but AMD began moving away from it with the rise of DDR5 memory. If DDR4 memory is being phased out yet still remains cheaper than DDR5, will enthusiasts hold on to those older PCs a bit longer? ASRock seems to be building in that direction.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.