RAM prices keep climbing, and a lot of people can’t afford to upgrade their PCs anymore. CPU makers have noticed, and their fix is to bring back DDR4, the memory from the previous generation.
Intel and AMD have turned back to DDR4. Their new CPUs will support the older, cheaper RAM so buyers have an option that fits their budget.
Gigabyte confirmed Friday that two of its motherboard lines will support “upcoming” CPUs on Intel’s LGA 1700 socket. LGA 1700 arrived in 2021 with 12th-gen Alder Lake and offered both DDR4 and DDR5 compatibility. Intel retired it in 2024 in favor of a DDR5-only platform.
According to Gigabyte, however, support for both DDR4 and DDR5 is returning, with new LGA 1700 processors “expected to launch in early 2027.”
The change, of course, appears to come from LGA 1700’s compatibility with both kinds of RAM, an advantage over its successor that has become much more relevant lately. Intel may be aiming to let buyers pick up a new CPU without also having to move to DDR5, which is now very expensive.
AMD is taking a similar step. In August, Gigabyte also announced a new series of motherboards for AM4, AMD’s previous platform that supports DDR4, alongside the 10th-anniversary relaunch of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
DDR4 first reached the market in 2014 and has since been replaced by the far faster DDR5. In ordinary times, buying new hardware built around a decade-old standard would be a poor investment. The RAM shortage has changed that calculation, as DDR4 appears to be hit much less by price increases than DDR5.
It could be years before prices come down again, and the official return of older sockets and chipsets is making that harder to ignore. For now, anyone who already owns DDR4 RAM has good reason to hold onto it.
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