With the release of the new Intel Alder Lake 12th generation CPUs, the new Z690 chipset and motherboards have now been announced. So what is the difference between the new Intel Z690 chipset as compared to the previous Z590? In this article, we are going to go over everything that you need to know about that.
What Is The Difference between Intel Z690 And Z590?
Intel Z690 chipset adds new PCIe 4.0 lanes. The new CPUs have a better PCIe Gen4 link to the chipset which doubles the bandwidth to 15.76 GB/s compared to 7.88 GB/s on X570 and 7.70 GB/s on Z590. The new chipset supports up to 24 Gen 4 lanes. This makes things better when it comes to the integrated Wi-Fi 6E and 2.5G Ethernet to co-exist with other features such as 10G Ethernet and 20G USB ports.
Intel Z690 is the first chipset to support DDR5 but DDR4 support is there as well. While the controller supports both, it is worth mentioning that you cannot run both at the same time. With DDR5 internal bottlenecks have been removed and the power management has been moved to the DIMMs rather than taking up space on the motherboard itself. You also get better-overclocking control.
The new XMP 3.0 allows memory manufacturers to have 3 Vendor profiles. You also get 2 rewritable profiles. Voltage can be controller per module. Z690 motherboards such as the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero are available for pre-order right now and more are going to pop up in a few days as we get closer to the November 4th release date.
These are the major differences that you need to know about the Intel Z690 chipset compared to the older Z590 chipset. If you are interested in getting the new Intel 12th generation CPUs then you can check out our article on where you can pre-order them right now.