AMD is working with its partners to make its Ryzen 7000 CPUs more accessible to the masses. While the processors are now priced at competitive price points, the corresponding motherboards are priced well above “average”. Most decent B650 boards with PCIe Gen 5 (limited to NVMe storage) start at over $200, nearly twice as much as their predecessors. AIBs are expected to rectify this in the coming weeks.
In a blog post, AMD stated that its partners would introduce an “ever-expanding” range of B650 motherboards for more budget-conscious gamers. These boards will feature many “next-generation” technologies plus CPU overclocking without breaking the bank. By stripping the surplus PCB layers required to enable PCIe Gen 5, AICs can significantly cut production costs.
Currently, PCIe 5.0 is redundant for discrete graphics cards as Gen 4 more than suffices, even in an x8 way configuration. Similarly, Gen 5 NVMe SSDs are almost non-existent at this point, and it’ll take another year for them to become relevant. The newly announced B650 boards will enter the market in the coming months, with the first offering expected as soon as next month.
A620 motherboards will further complement these parts. Unlike the B650 and X670 chipsets, this segment has no “E” or Extreme edition boards. This implies simpler PCBs without PCIe Gen 5 and minimal overclocking support. However, for most mainstream users, even the stripped down A620 offerings should suffice.
The A620 chipset will feature up to 28 PCIe Gen 4 lanes from the CPU (vs. 28 PCIe Gen 5 on B650). The chipset to CPU interconnect will be downgraded to Gen 3 instead of Gen 4. Furthermore, there won’t be any USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 ports, limiting high-speed I/O to a dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface. Two USB 3.2 Gen 1 port will back these.
As is the norm with x20 chipsets, overclocking will be limited to the memory and fabric, with multipliers and BLCKs remaining out of reach. High-speed EXPO memory profiles will be supported across the stack. And finally, multi-GPU support, including CrossFireX and SLI, has been curbed with a single PCIe x16/x8 dGPU slot per board.
