Asus says its Intel 800-series motherboards are approved to run DDR5-7200 without an XMP profile, pointing to a RAM speed boost for an Arrow Lake refresh

Like most gaming PCs, yours will probably be using overclocked RAM sticks. You might not think it is, but every time you enable XMP or EXPO, that's precisely what you're doing. So, fans of Intel's latest CPUs might be excited to learn that Asus has just announced that its 800-series boards now support DDR5-7200 without overclocking.

And it's the most casual and simple of announcements, as you like, with the post on X (via Videocardz) simply stating:

If you look carefully at the pictures in the post, you'll see some screenshots of the free software tool CPU-z showing the RAM speeds and timings of a kit in an Asus Prime Z890-P motherboard. Zoom into the section for the SPD tab and you'll see several columns labelled JEDEC #14 through to JEDEC #17.

JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) is a consortium of semiconductor and electronics companies that work together to agree on standards for all things PC-related. In this case, it's about RAM speeds and timings. Anything labelled Jedec is basically classed as 'not overclocked'—ie the RAM and CPU are all good to work at those ratings by default.

Intel's Core Ultra 200S processors support DDR5 running up to a JEDEC-approved 6,400 MT/s, though they will happily cope with faster RAM than this. I say happily, but it's not 100% guaranteed that your Core Ultra CPU will handle DDR5-8400, for example, because that's only achievable by officially overclocking the RAM and the processor's memory controllers.

But what Asus is saying is that if you use one of its 800-series motherboards, you'll be good for hitting 7,200 MT/s sans overclocking. Which puzzles me a bit—why didn't Intel say that its CPUs were capable of this during the launch of Arrow Lake? It could have said something along the lines of 'Our processors natively support up to 7,200 MT/s and our launch partners will have products to comply with this in the near future. For now, you get 6,400 MT/s.'

One possible explanation is that Intel is actually keeping this for the expected Arrow Lake Refresh. It's generally thought that, just like the last-gen 14th Gen Core lineup, the next release of Intel processors will be nothing more than clock-bumped Arrow Lake chips. Having a higher default memory controller clock would naturally be part of that.

If so, then does that mean Asus has jumped the gun here and given us a wee snippet about what Intel has planned for us while we wait for the goliath-sized Nova Lake processors?

I've contacted Asus to ask about what the post means for current 800-series owners and whether they'll need to grab a BIOS update to have this JEDEC DDR5-7200 or not, but at the time of writing, it hasn't got back to me yet. We'll update this story as soon as we hear more.

As for using ultra-fast RAM with your Core Ultra 200S chip, well, I tested a whole host of games and applications with speeds up to 8,200 MT/s and it didn't make a lot of difference, especially in gaming. However, that was before all the various microcode, BIOS, and Windows updates we've seen since Arrow Lake launched last October.

Even so, I'm not confident that 7,200 MT/s will have any noticeable effect on your games' performance, as Arrow Lake's biggest weakness is poor RAM latencies. Higher clock speeds help mitigate this, but to completely counter it, you need a big boost in clocks all around and not just on the RAM and memory controller. Oh, and an improved cache system.

In other words, what we need is just a better processor altogether. One called Nova Lake, perhaps?