Intel’s B560 will feature support for DDR4 overclocking – A long-awaited response to AMD/Ryzen?

Memory performance matters, and being able to access the full performance of your chosen modules is a critical aspect when it comes to getting the most performance out of your system, especially for gaming workloads. 

With B560, it looks like Intel is finally addressing a major weakness of their older mid-range chipsets, their lack of support for memory overclocking. Before B560, Intel’s mid-range B460, B360 and older B-series chipsets could only support memory clock speeds that were officially supported by processors, limiting DDR4 memory speeds to 2666MHz, 2933MHz or lower speeds depending on your processor. This limited the gaming performance of many systems, especially as faster DDR4 memory modules became more common and affordable. 

Modern gaming PCs feature CPUs with higher core counts and games that are more demanding than ever, a factor that makes memory performance critical. If core counts rise and memory performance doesn’t rise with it, CPUs can become bottlenecked, and systems may not operate to their fullest potential. There is a reason why memory speeds have increased in response to higher CPU core counts.  

As the core counts of Intel’s processors have increased, their B-series chipsets’ memory speed limitations have become an ever-larger performance bottleneck, and B560 is due to fix that. However, it does look like Intel’s budget-oriented H510 chipset will still feature memory speed limits.