If you are frustrated with the cost of DDR5, one of the alternatives – other than socket AM4 from AMD – is to stick with the older, but still readily available, Intel LGA1700. Not only are there DDR4 boards available which support 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPUs, but those processors themselves remain in production – and will continue to be for some time.

After seeing the headline at our favorite website about video cards, we visited the source (Club386) to see exactly what Intel’s Robert Hallock had to say about Raptor Lake. And he said, in portions reproduced from the source in an indented quotation section below this paragraph, this:

“Raptor Lake is a big part of our strategy – I want to be very clear about that. It’s still really, really good, even with multiple generations of hardware from other vendors coming after it, so it’s not going anywhere. I want people to understand that Raptor Lake will continue to be abundantly available.”

“You’ve also seen some new motherboard announcements that support both DDR4 and 5 on Raptor Lake, as kind of like a bridge between worlds for people.”

There you have it. And in the DDR5 a.i. nightmare era any alternatives are welcome, even if that means you won’t be on the latest and greatest (like Intel’s self-proclaimed fastest-ever gaming CPU, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus).

We close this short news post with a screenshot taken minutes ago at Newegg.com, which displays current pricing for Intel 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 and Core i7 processors. When the possibility of some (relatively) low-cost DDR4 is considered, maybe an all new parts build in 2026 is actually feasible after all?