Gigabyte pushed BIOS updates on Friday for its whole B760 and H610 motherboard lineup, DDR4 and DDR5 boards alike, so they can take new LGA 1700 chips the company says are “expected to launch in early 2027.” Intel left that socket behind in 2024 for a DDR5-only approach, and the reason it’s back shows up on a price tag: The Verge priced a 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 kit at $620 and the matching DDR4 kit at $260.

Here is what is actually known. Gigabyte’s announcement names no processors, and Intel didn’t respond to The Verge’s request for comment, so the whole story rests on a motherboard vendor saying chips are coming. Tom’s Hardware connects it to a rumored Raptor Lake refresh, and I’d file that under rumor until Intel says something. The boards are ready; the silicon is a date range and a socket.

AMD is doing the same thing from the other direction. In August, Gigabyte announced new boards for AMD’s DDR4-era AM4 platform to go with the tenth-anniversary relaunch of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, according to The Verge. Two platform owners reaching back five and ten years inside one quarter tells me more than any price chart does: the memory shortage has moved from changing what we pay to changing what gets built.

That fits what I’ve been tracking this month. Samsung warned that memory stays tight until 2028 and the Galaxy S26 went up $100, and even the newest standard is being validated for phones that may not ship with it, as in Samsung’s LPDDR6 test on a Snapdragon. The supply side is just as strained: China’s DRAM insurgent hasn’t loosened anything yet, and the antitrust suit against Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron is still the best summary of how the big three got here. If the squeeze really runs to 2028, a DDR4 platform stops being a stopgap and becomes a product line.

I find it a little funny. DDR5-only was sold as progress, and a spreadsheet reversed it. DDR5 is still faster and draws less power, and in a normal year I’d tell anyone building a PC to buy it. This isn’t a normal year, and a $360 difference on one kit is hard to argue with if the machine mostly browses and edits documents. If you already own DDR4, hang onto it.

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