VideoCardz revealed in a leak yesterday images of a few motherboards from Asus' upcoming Z390 lineup. The major discovery was that the Maximus XI Extreme and Gene models from the brand's Republic of Gamers (ROG) family will come with support for DC (double capacity) DIMMs.
The DC DIMM standard is Asus' own creation for allowing motherboards with limited amounts of memory slots to maximize their memory capacity. It's too early to tell if the DC DIMM format will catch on. Now that Samsung has already started selling its 32GB DDR4 memory modules, DC DIMMs would, at the very least, need to match that capacity in order to compete. Samsung's offering is clocked at 2,666MHz with 1.2V and a CAS latency of 19. It would be interesting to see whether DC DIMM can go higher due to the increased amount of memory chips onboard.
So far, veteran memory manufacturer G.Skill and newcomer Zadak 511 are the first companies to jump aboard Asus' bandwagon. G.Skill has lent its highly acclaimed Trident Z RGB branding to the cause, while Zadak 511 has dressed its first DC DIMM in the brand's shiny Shield armor. If you look closely, you'll notice that the DC DIMM is basically a taller version of your typical DDR4 memory modules, which makes sense since DC DIMM houses more DRAM memory chips. While we're on the topic of memory chips, the Zadak 511 DC DIMM shown in the leaked image employs memory chips from none other than, you guessed it, Samsung. The South Korean manufacturer already laid out plans to tone down its memory chip production next year. If DC DIMM was to be available--and that's a big if--it would probably be very limited in supply and cost a small fortune to secure a piece.
At the time of writing, it's unknown whether DC DIMM support is exclusive to Asus Z390 motherboards or if the other major motherboard manufacturers will join in on the fun. In the meantime, we have reached out to G.Skill and Zadak 511 for further information on their DC DIMMs and will update this article accordingly if they get back to us.
