If you’re trying to build a budget to mid-range gaming PC or workstation with inexpensive but modern components, it’s hard to recommend the AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. This is partly because Intel processors offer more cores for the money, but AMD AM5 socket motherboards remain consistently expensive, and the lack of DDR4 memory support means you’ll pay more to get DDR5 RAM.
That may change somewhat thanks to AMD’s new entry-level A620 chipset, which the company quietly announced last week. AMD says they should drop the price of AM5-based motherboards to around $85, which is slightly north of the low-cost Intel H610 and B660-based motherboards, although they will still need DDR5 memory (for the DDR5-6000 that AMD recommends). for optimal Ryzen performance, the price premium is still not twice what you would pay for the same amount of DDR4-3200 memory).
Compared to X670 and B650 based motherboards, A620 chipsets will have more limited connectivity options. There’s no PCI Express 5.0 support for either graphics cards or SSDs – not such a big hit since none of the GPUs and few SSDs support PCIe 5.0 anyway at the moment, but it’s a step back for future security. The processor will still provide enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for the GPU and one SSD, but the chipset only supports PCIe 3.0 speeds for optional SSDs. The chipset also supports fewer USB ports in general and does not support 20 Gigabit USB ports.
Perhaps more importantly, the A620 chipsets do not support any sort of CPU overclocking, nor do Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) or Curve Optimizer features to automatically overclock or undervoltage. This is consistent with past AMD A-series chipsets and Intel’s non-Z-series chipsets, which also limited support for overclocking features. AMD says that memory overclocking will continue to be supported by “most [motherboard] models.”
These boards will be the best choice for those who want to buy a regular old Ryzen 7600, 7700 or 7900 processor, install it and use it without much configuration. AMD says higher power Ryzen chips like the X-series or X3D will work as long as the motherboard BIOS supports them, but their peak performance can be hampered by low-level voltage regulator modules (VRMs).
Case in point: ASRock offers two of the earliest A620 motherboards, A620-HDV/M.2 and A620-HDV/M.2+ with similar names. Both motherboards look almost the same, but the M.2+ version has noticeably beefed up VRMs with improved cooling (see the area to the left of the CPU socket). ASRock rates the low-end board only for 65W TDP processors, while the M.2+ version can work with 120W TDP processors.
AMD says more A620 based boards are coming from the usual suspects – ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Biostar are all planning to release a range of A620 motherboard variants.