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What Is the Difference Between Gear 1 vs. Gear 2 DDR4 Memory Speeds?

Content Type: Product Information & Documentation | Article ID: 000058859 | Last Reviewed: 05/12/2023

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11th Generation Intel® Core™ Desktop Processors & DDR4 Memory Speed 3200 & 2933 MHz Support.

Description

Need to understand the difference between Gear 1 vs Gear 2 DDR4 memory speed support for 11th Generation Intel® Core™ Desktop Processors

Gear 1 means processor memory controller and memory speed are equal.
Gear 2 means processor memory controller operates at half the memory speed (such as CPU memory controller is at 1600MHz while memory speed is at 3200MHz when operating as Gear 2).
For DDR4-2933 (or lower speed) :
- All the 11th Gen Intel Core Processors operate in Gear 1, no Gear 2.
For DDR4-3200:
- i9-11900K and i9-11900KF operate in Gear 1.
- The rest of the 11th Gen Intel Core Processors can operate in Gear 2.

This article applies to 3 products.

11th Generation Intel® Core™ i5 Processors 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processors 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i9 Processors

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