ASRock Readies For Raptor Lake, Issues BIOS Updates for 600

600-series motherboards will be compatible with both Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs

ASRock has announced full compatibility with 13th-Gen Raptor Lake CPUs on most of its existing lineup of 600-series motherboards today, including Z690, H670, B660, and H610 models. Support is available now, with new BIOS updates featuring Raptor Lake CPU support. Check out ASRock's list for currently supported Raptor Lake motherboards.

This announcement fulfills Intel's promise that its LGA 1700 platform would support two generations of CPUs, both the current 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs and the upcoming 13th-Gen Raptor Lake processors. But for now, Raptor Lake support on 600-series boards will not come out of the box and will require users to update the BIOS on their motherboard to add support. It will take time for motherboard makers to ship updated BIOS' from the factory with a pre-installed BIOS that supports Raptor Lake.

Thankfully ASRock boards make this update process quite easy if you are building a new Raptor Lake system from scratch (in the near future). Most of ASRock's 600-series models come with BIOS flashback support which allows the UEFI/BIOS to be updated without a CPU or memory installed into the motherboard.

Raptor Lake is rumored to be coming out later this year alongside AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Details on Raptor Lake aren't great, but current rumors indicate that Raptor Lake could be 20% faster than Alder Lake parts. These new chips will feature double the amount of E-cores compared to Alder Lake parts and could feature significantly higher clock speeds of nearly 6 GHz — and that's before CPU overclocking.

Intel will also be releasing brand new 700-series chipsets alongside its Raptor Lake CPUs with better features than its 600-series counterparts. But details of these features are completely unknown. The only exception to this is one rumor which says 600-series boards will feature more PCIe Gen 4 lanes on the chipset.

But thankfully, the 700-series will support backward compatibility with Alder Lake as well as support for DDR4 memory on some motherboards. So Intel users will be able to choose whichever motherboard they want, whether that be a 600-series or 700-series model.

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Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

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