A datasheet containing the full specifications of an industrial Thin Mini-ITX LGA1700 motherboard has surfaced as an interesting nugget of information about upcoming 13th gen Intel Raptor Lake-S (RPL-S) systems. The Mitac PH12ADI features an H610 or Q670 chipset, built for 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake (ADL-S) Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 processors up to 65W, and supports DDR5 RAM. Mitac highlights that if you build an Alder Lake system, you should choose DDR5-4800 RAM to populate the twin 262-pin SO-DIMM slots on this motherboard. However, the Mitac datasheet implies that Raptor Lake will support DDR5-5200 modules by default. Therefore, please add some salt to this early information as this Intel partner leak or slip-up could be an error.
Intel's 13th Gen Core processors supporting DDR5-5200 would be a small but welcome advance by default. It simply means that any tier of Raptor Lake system should be able to plug in DDR5-5200 modules and go without any further configuration step(s) and any explicit 'overclocking' support from the motherboard.
In our Intel Alder Lake RAM guide, considering DDR4 and DDR5 and the wide range of different latency values and speeds available, we weren't impressed by the potential performance boost in choosing DDR5 over DDR4 or the performance scaling of DDR5 RAM. Given this context, moving from the default of DDR5-4800 to DDR5-5200 is a minor upgrade. However, averaging our suite of performance tests on Alder Lake comparing DDR5-4800 and DDR5-5200 with equal timings, we saw a 1% performance benefit.
As well as the default support for faster memory, Raptor Lake CPUs on Intel 700-series chipsets could boost the maximum number of PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 lanes available. This is what might tempt you to upgrade to both a new processor and a new motherboard with Raptor Lake arrives.
There has been some talk about made for Intel 700-series chipset motherboards being DDR5 only. Indeed, AMD has already taken this route with its initial wave of Ryzen 7000 'Raphael' processors and AM5 socket motherboards.
We will have more facts about Raptor Lake processors, performance, memory support, and the new 700-series chipsets (e.g. Intel B760, H770 and Z790 motherboards) nearer launch, expected in Q4 this year.
Almost a year ago, Intel inadvertently confirmed that its 600-series chipsets would be suitable for two generations of processors – Raptor Lake, followed by Raptor Lake (12th and 13th Gen Core processors). We have taken this as a given ever since, and we expect that people owning Intel 600-series chipset motherboards today will be able to upgrade to Raptor Lake CPUs with at most a BIOS update being required.
