AMD quietly released the A620 chipset on Friday for its Ryzen 7000 processors. With a starting price of $85, it will power the lowest-end AM5 boards for budget-oriented gamers. The A620 motherboards will come with the caveats of their 500-series predecessors and then some. Any kind of CPU related overclocked will remain off limits, including Precision Boost Overdrive and Auto-OC, with memory overclocking making the cut.
To improve the adoption of its next-generation Ryzen 7000 processors, AMD has made the strategic decision to limit CPU support on A620 boards. Although the cheapest B650 boards can now be had for under $150, they’re still pricier than the lower-end B550/B550 offerings. The release of $85 A620 motherboards is expected to tackle that part of the market.
Unfortunately, the A620 chipset will only fully support the Ryzen 7000 non-X CPUs, plus the 7800X3D which have a TDP of 65W. While the chipset will natively support the higher-end X-series CPUs, the VRMs of these boards will be designed for 65W SKUs to keep costs down.
The Ryzen 9 CPUs will perform similar to how they do on B650/X670 motherboards with Eco Mode enabled. As such, while content creation performance will take a hit, gaming should largely remain unaffected.
Compared to the B650 chipset, you the PCIe lane counts are only marginally less, but we lose Gen 5 capabilities and USB 20Gbps support. There are sixteen PCIe Gen 4 lanes for the dGPU, four for the NVMe drive, and 32 overall. You can only two USB 10Gbps and two 5Gbps ports, each.
At the time of writing, there are two A620 motherboards available at Newegg, both from ASRock. These are price at $85 and $99. The former comes with one Gen 4 M.2 slot and two USB 3 ports while the latter features two M.2 and three USB 3 ports.
The A620 chipset is based on the PROM21 chipset, the same that powers the B650 (PROM 21 x1) and X670 (PROM21 x2) motherboards. Instead of making a new chipset for its lowest-end motherboards, AMD has decided to go with the existing variant.
