At the beginning of this year, I paid at least 200 euros for the most basic AM5 motherboard that you could buy at that time. Now you can do it in half, which makes AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processor platform even more attractive. But is a cheap AM5 board a good choice?
To find out, I went to work with the cheapest AM5 motherboard I could find on Pricewatch: the ASRock A620M-HDV/M.2 and its slightly more expensive M.2+ variant. Both boards use the relatively new A620 chipset.
A620 vs. B650 and X670
Compared to the B650 and X670, the A620 chipset has been largely stripped down. For example, it does not support PCI Express 5.0, USB ports have been capped at 20Gb/s and the processor cannot be overclocked. DDR5 memory can be set to a higher speed with EXPO than the official maximum of 5200MT/s.
| A620 | B650 (e) | X670 (E) | |
| PCI Express from the CPU | 20×4.0 | B650E: 24 x 5.0 B650: 8×5.0, 16×4.0 |
X670E: 24 x 5.0 X670: 8 x 5.0, 16 x 4.0 |
| PCI Express chipset | 12 PCIe 4.0 slots | 12 PCIe slots (8×4.0, 4×3.0) | 20 PCIe slots (12 x 4.0, 8 x 3.0) |
| USB 20Gb/s | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| USB 10Gb/s | 4 + 2 | 4 + 2 | 8 + 4 |
| USB 5Gb/s | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| USB 2.0 | 6 | 6 | 12 |
| sata | 4 | 4 | 8 |
| Overclocking | no | Yes | Yes |
On the following pages I take a closer look at A620 motherboards and test their performance.