ASRock is launching a new motherboard that has a total of six DIMM slots (where you install your RAM). Up from the usual four slots found on most mobos, this might seem a little pointless right now. Given how stupidly expensive RAM for gaming is, who in their right mind would be buying more than usual? Well, the new ASRock H610M COMBO motherboard is hiding some clever tricks up its sleeves to give you both DDR4 and DDR5 compatibility.
Based around the Intel LGA1700 CPU socket, ASRock's new motherboard is the first I've ever seen that supports both generations of RAM. DDR4 and DDR5 memory slots have a different physical design, so you can't mix and match them on the same DIMM slots. The new H610M COMBO board gets around this by supplying two extra DDR4 slots, which could help anyone who was hoping to upgrade their PC right before memory prices shot through the roof.
It must be said that one area of the PC market that's being hit less by these RAM price surges is in prebuilt machines. If that's an option for you (which I think should be if you're staring down the barrel of 32GB of DDR5 for over $400), then take a look at the prebuilt links here:
You can't use DDR4 and DDR5 RAM at the same time while using this board, but you can swap between them. This means that it would be perfect for anyone who was preparing to finally upgrade to a newer-gen PC right before the AI-infused RAM pricing apocalypse happened.
If you've not been keeping up, RAM prices have gone through the roof in the last few months - in fact, DDR4 can actually be even more pricey than DDR5. The cause is that a massive influx of AI production through data centers is causing the world's supply of RAM technology to be swallowed up (and that isn't an exaggeration), which is hurting consumers because the supply for manufacturing RAM for gaming PCs is so limited.
This motherboard shows that it's possible for DDR4 and DDR5 to co-exist - so why on earth hasn't it until now? While this is a semi-fringe need for the market, I personally love that ASRock is setting the trend, and I want other manufacturers to take note.
Sadly, it might be more difficult to implement this due to CPU architecture. The LGA1700 CPU socket that caters to Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation products was thrown out into the wild right as DDR5 was starting to be adopted, so you can find motherboards for this chipset that are DDR4 compatible. On the AMD/AM5 side of things, and with Intel's updated architecture, this wider compatibility hasn't been a need, so I don't know if it'd be possible.
Granted, you would need to be okay with slight performance drawbacks, at least in this first iteration. The COMBO DIMM slots can only handle up to 4,800MHz speeds when using DDR5 (which is sort of the starting speed of that generation); meanwhile, the DDR4 slots can use up to 2,666MHz in the DDR4 lanes. With the four DDR5 slots, you can have up to 96GB of memory, and with DDR4, a maximum of 64GB is supported.
It might seem a little pointless, or like a halfway house for actually upgrading to a DDR5 PC, but AI DRAM pricing hell is projected to continue until at least 2028, which could make it an absolute nightmare to get a hold of or afford new RAM.
With companies like Micron literally abandoning consumers in the name of making AI profits, I think pro-consumer innovations need to be made elsewhere in the market. I hope this new ASRock motherboard could be hinting towards those being made, because wider compatibility could be great for the PC gaming market.
If you're in the UK, we have a separate best gaming PC guide for you, and if you're set on building, check out the best graphics card, and the best SSD for gaming.
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