Some AMD AM5 motherboards reportedly won’t support DDR4 memory

Rumors have been making the rounds that suggest AMD’s AM5 platform for next-gen Ryzen CPUs will only support DDR5 memory. This news comes from Tom’s Hardware, which got in contact with several sources that supported this. As always, be reasonably skeptical about this sort of thing until we see confirmation from either AMD or other board manufacturers.

If this does end up being the case, it could make the upgrade to Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs more expensive (unless memory prices drop off a cliff over the next few months like graphics cards). However, there could be some potential positives to this on the performance side of things. Overall, it isn’t surprising to hear that AMD may want to focus on using DDR5 memory for its AM5 platform. Intel already made the jump with Alder Lake, after all.

Moving on from DDR4 memory

The motherboards in question are the X670 and the B650, with the aforementioned sources allegedly confirming that these will support AMD’s AM5 platform and exclusively use DDR5 memory. This would effectively kick-start the process of sending DDR4 memory to the curb. But this may cause more cost issues than anyone really wants to deal with.

DDR5 memory is still very expensive, and often double the price of most DDR4 kits. Granted, most of the overblown pricing can be blamed on the chip shortage that’s been affecting all corners of the tech scene since the pandemic started. But DDR5 memory is also more expensive to produce in general, due to the onboard power management and other features.

The advice has been to stick with DDR4 since it’s so much cheaper and doesn’t offer a massive performance loss. However, that may not be the case for too much longer.

(Image credit: AMD).

The decision to shift to DDR5 does make sense from a performance perspective. AMD would be able to fully optimize its next-gen processors for DDR5 memory, and improve performance across the board.  Considering how Ryzen CPUs tend to benefit from fast memory, this could make DDR5 a much more enticing upgrade.

There’s also the chance that some motherboards could still support DDR4 memory in the future. That’s only if AMD’s AM5 platform supports both DDR4 and DDR5 memory though. Either way, it’s clear that manufacturers want to move on from DDR4 sooner rather than later. The hope now is that prices continue to drop for DDR5 memory. AMD has a busy year ahead, especially with the rumored RDNA 3 announcement in September.