AMD's affordable $85 A620 motherboards should fix Ryzen's price premium
A620 motherboards are thin on USB connectivity and won't do PCIe Gen 5 at all, but at least they're cheap.
Hot on the heels of B650 motherboards belatedly hitting AMD's $125 target comes news of even cheaper $85 boards. But this time the lower price is courtesy of the new budget A620 chipset.
AMD tells us the A620 chipset will be available from today and offer key features from the existing AM5 platform, including DDR5 support, one-click memory overclocking, and up to 32x PCIe 4 lanes.
Note that's memory overclocking not CPU overclocking and PCIe Gen 4, not Gen 5. The latter is twice as fast and only available on the existing B550 and X670 chipsets. So, the A620 won't support those fancy new PCIe Gen 5 SSDs.
The A620 also has bandwidth between the CPU socket and the chipset itself, with just eight PCIe Gen 3 lanes. The B650 has eight Gen 4 lanes plus four Gen 3 lanes, while the X670 ups that to 12 Gen 4 and eight Gen 3.
As a consequence, USB connectivity takes a bit of a battering on the A620. It has just two USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections, where the B650 has six plus one USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface (don't you just love USB branding?). As for the X670, that supports 12 USB 3.2 Gen 1 and two USB 3.2 Gen 2. Got all that?
Still, the A620 does support four memory DIMMs, like its bigger siblings. But you don't get CPU overclocking. Other omissions include XFR2 Enhanced, which is a sort of auto-overclocking tool, and Precision Boost Overdrive, which is a more hands-on overclocking tool.
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In other words, the A620 is pretty basic but should be fine provided you're not into overclocking and don't need to attach a load of high-bandwidth USB peripherals.
For the record, we doubt the PCIe Gen 4 limitation will be much of an issue. You almost certainly won't need it for graphics performance and while the latest PCIe Gen 5 SSDs do offer huge sequential performance, the 7GB/s of Gen 4 drives is hardly shabby. Those new Gen 5 drives don't seem to move the needle much for random 4K performance, either, which is where we'd really like to see some improvements.
The Gigabyte A620M Gaming X shown above is among the first A620 boards to surface, but Gigabyte has yet to release full specs. One thing to look out for, however, is M.2 drive slots. We suspect the norm for these cheap boards may be a single slot. Which may be fine for your needs. Or not. You have been warned.