In a preview video on YouTube posted today by Bing, who I believe is an ASUS ROG employee, the ship’s company has been working on a solution to allow users that buy ASUS Z690 motherboards built on DDR5, to run DDR4 in them. Because Intel limited the platform to either DDR5 or DDR4 per motherboard, there ’ s no room to run both, until now. In the video, Bing describes the newfangled circuit board calling card they ’ ve been prototyping .

The use case is fairly simple – have a DDR5 board like the ROG Apex, put the carrier wag in a memory slot, and place the modify DDR4 in the crown.
obviously, the situation here is more complex than just using this carrier wave poster. DDR5 and DDR4 are more than merely a pass remainder between them – DDR4 is a unmarried 64-bit memory channel per module, while DDR5 is dual 32-bit channel per faculty. The key emergence is that DDR5 does power management per module, where DDR4 relies on ability management on the motherboard, so that has to be taken into consideration. besides, adding in a carrier card extends memory traces, which could degrade the quality of the bespeak .
What ASUS does here is use a special BIOS revision to allow the ROG Apex DDR5 to run in DDR4 mode. This means that the traces to the memory slots, although laid out for DDR5 operation, are switched into DDR4 mode. then, on the carrier card, this takes the 5V power signal and runs it through the equivalent of motherboard exponent management, and controls the datum lines to maintain integrity for signal, rotational latency, power, etc .
Bing explains in the video recording that this is still identical a lot a prototype. It looks like they ’ rhenium focus to get it to work on one motherboard with one memory kit inaugural, before optimizing it. Bing states that the carrier circuit board is very tall, and there is room for optimization to make it smaller in the future before ASUS might offer it as a retail product. besides a wide range of validation is likely needed ampere well.
The video recording goes to show with a individual DDR4 module in the aircraft carrier card the organization running at DDR4-4400 with a Core i5-12600K. To confirm DDR5 hush works, the organization is shown running double modules of DDR5-4400, at least to the BIOS screen. If these modules come to market, they are even in early prototypes, and ASUS will likely judge feasibility and need for them for price .
informant : YouTube ( in Mandarin )