Asus Adds Support for 256GB of DDR5 Memory to Its 600/700 Series Intel Motherboards

This week, Intel announced the Core i9-14900KS "Special Edition" CPU, effectively bringing an end to the LGA 1700 socket era from Intel. Now that the platform is effectively entering a technology retirement home, Asus is letting it rip by upping the amount of DDR5 memory allowed on both 600 and 700 series boards. Although most home users rarely need more than 64GB of memory, Asus is now supporting up to 256GB of DDR5. Although this is an absurd amount of memory for a consumer PC, we're never ones to stand in the way of progress. If you own an AMD AM5 board from Asus, your mobo already supports this much memory.

Asus announced it is upping the memory ceiling for DDR5 sticks on a wide variety of its late-model motherboards. The news follows the previous announcement almost exactly one year ago that Asus was increasing the memory allowed on its 600-and-700 series motherboards from 128GB to 192GB. Now that we've reached 256GB, though, we're officially at the top of the mountain, as there is not a single DIMM larger than 64GB for a consumer PC. It's the end of the road for both the platform and memory increases.

If 192GB of DDR5 memory wasn't enough, you should probably start thinking about getting a workstation. Credit: Asus

Asus' announcement states that owners of either 600-series or 700-series motherboards will need to update the BIOS to get the new memory increase. There's an updated BIOS for Z790, B760, H770, and B760M motherboards. For the previous generation boards, a new BIOS is available for Z690, Q670M, and several W680 workstation boards. The BIOS descriptions on the Asus website that include this new feature don't say what memory speeds are supported at 256GB. Still, Tom's Hardware notes that high-capacity DIMMs are typically slower than smaller-capacity sticks, so it's always a tradeoff when going with these kinds of memory modules.

That said, 256GB should be more than ample for any projects you might be working on, assuming you don't mind the tradeoff in memory bandwidth. Though we doubt most ATX motherboard owners will ever care about this feature, it could benefit folks with Mini-ITX systems since those typically only offer two DIMM slots and can now run 128GB of memory.

In the end, this announcement won't move the needle much right now, as we couldn't find a single 64GB unbuffered DIMM for sale anywhere. However, that may change in a year or so, which could breathe some new life into the platform down the road. The issue is still going to be price, though, as these modules will be so expensive that they likely won't be worth it for most people. It just won't make sense for someone to spend $1,000 on memory when their $400 CPU is limited by the number of PCIe lanes available, so they should probably think about going the workstation route if they need that much RAM. Still, more is always better, and perhaps it'll raise the ceiling for memory capacities in future platforms, which is never a bad thing.