Sunday, April 2nd 2023
AMD's A620 Chipset More Capable Than Early Motherboards Suggest
For whatever reason, all of the AMD A620 chipset based motherboards that were announced on Friday, are not showing off the capabilities of the chipset and are in fact making it look worse than it is. AMD has no doubt limited the A620 platform, with some limitations that seem arbitrary, but the motherboards makers clearly haven't helped, as they've made the platform look very unattractive, when in fact it could be entirely acceptable, for a budget build. As you can see from AMD's feature matrix below, the company has removed a fair share of features compared to the B650 chipset, but for example, two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports can be implemented. Despite this, only Biostar and Gigabyte have implemented one such port each, with ASUS, ASRock and MSI implementing zero.
Yes, the platform is limited to 65 W CPUs—assuming you want your CPUs boost behaviour to work as intended—which is likely to cause some issues, as it might not be clear to potential buyers that are looking for a cheap motherboard for their system and it's something AMD and its board partners need to communicate a lot better. However, the A620 platform has enough PCIe lanes for two M.2 drives and enough left for all the peripheral connectivity and some PCIe slots, yet most of the boards appear to shun a second M.2 slot for no apparent reason beyond the cost of the physical interface. It looks as if AMD's board partners have decided to try and cut back as much as they can in terms of features that we've ended up with boards that no sensible person should be buying, as the boards are barely fit for purpose. Time will tell if we'll see some better boards down the road, but it would appear that AMD's board partner would rather sell its potential customers a more expensive B650 board, based on the weak line-up of boards that launched on Friday.
Yes, the platform is limited to 65 W CPUs—assuming you want your CPUs boost behaviour to work as intended—which is likely to cause some issues, as it might not be clear to potential buyers that are looking for a cheap motherboard for their system and it's something AMD and its board partners need to communicate a lot better. However, the A620 platform has enough PCIe lanes for two M.2 drives and enough left for all the peripheral connectivity and some PCIe slots, yet most of the boards appear to shun a second M.2 slot for no apparent reason beyond the cost of the physical interface. It looks as if AMD's board partners have decided to try and cut back as much as they can in terms of features that we've ended up with boards that no sensible person should be buying, as the boards are barely fit for purpose. Time will tell if we'll see some better boards down the road, but it would appear that AMD's board partner would rather sell its potential customers a more expensive B650 board, based on the weak line-up of boards that launched on Friday.
51 Comments on AMD's A620 Chipset More Capable Than Early Motherboards Suggest
Regardless, the boards launched so far, aren't taking advantage of what the A620 platform can offer, but instead have gimped it further, which makes it uninteresting for most consumers, especially as there are finally some $125 B650 boards.
The A620 boards available today are perfect for first-time PC owners. Pair them with a Ryzen 7600, Radeon 6600, 16GB of RAM, a 250GB nvme and a 1TB SATA drive, and you've got yourself a very decent 1080p gaming machine. What else do you really need/are missing out on for a build like this?
Altogether you've got yourself a capable gaming machine without having to spend much, and a higher level of futureproofing compared to going with an AM4 build.
I've got an X670E board and I've barely scratched the surface in terms of utilizing all its features. It has 4 nvme slots and I'm only using the 1 PCIe Gen 5 slot, and I've got a Gen 4 stick in it too! It's overkill only because I could afford it. So these A620 boards are not insensible.
www.techpowerup.com/306697/msi-reveals-a-single-amd-a620-chipset-based-motherboard
or even this?
www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A620M%20Pro%20RS%20WiFi/index.asp
I couldn't personally recommend these boards to anyone, I would rather go with a low-end Intel system over using these boards.
Yes, Biostar and Gigabyte have passable boards, but at what price point? Asus wants stupid money for their boards, starting at €139 in Europe.
www.techpowerup.com/306695/asus-unveils-three-amd-a620-chipset-based-motherboards
The whole point of this article is that the chipset isn't as bad as the motherboard makers have made it appear, as they've done a truly terrible job this time around when it comes to leveraging the available features. Keep in mind that there's no PCIe 5.0 on these boards and only a couple of PCIe 4.0 on most boards, as the board makers decided to go with PCIe 3.0 for the expansion slots, again for no apparent reason, as the chipset can deliver four PCIe 4.0 lanes and the PCIe 3.0 lanes should be used for things like Ethernet and WiFi, that doesn't need more bandwidth.
I started testing and writing about hardware on a professional level back in 2001 and before that, I had been working for various computer shops as well as Siemens-Nixdorf servicing their consumer PCs and many of the boards announced on Friday, are in my book at the same level as PC Chips, which really was the bottom of the barrel garbage back it the day and product I would never have told anyone to even consider buying.
- Ryzen 7600 (doesn't support overclocking, neither does A620)
- Radeon 6600 (PCIe Gen 4)
- 16GB DDR5 (2 x 8 GB, so two RAM slots are enough)
- 250GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe
- 1TB SATA SSD
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Enough USB ports for a keyboard, mouse, game controller, and even headphones.
These A620 boards satisfy those requirements, and will perform very well at 1080p gaming. They are more than enough for this kind of build. What else do you need?Now, if the prices in Europe are insane, that's a Europe problem.
If you're referring to the chipset, A620 and A-series chipsets before it are not chipsets for "comfy". They're chipsets for "bare minimum" or "basic" like you said. If you want more, there's B650. You want even more, there's X670. AMD wouldn't invest in developing and releasing a third-generation A-series chipset if there wasn't a market for it.
And that is a sad thing to say.
I don't know what Intel has at the same price range though, but it's well known that AM5 is in the bullshit expensive category - however many people go for AMD on principle or for the better CPU, plus once the APUs land they'll also have the best onboard graphics, so there's that.In my experience the people who try to make their point by bringing up how long they've been doing something, are usually the ones most unfit for the job they are doing. I've met a lot of such people in real life.
I also agree with the article writer, et al. who argue these boards on offer right now aren't a good value proposition. In comparison, one fella who argued he'd be happy building an entry level machine off one of the currently released A620 boards. While it may be defensible for something this very moment, there's no way those specs will age, I say, even in the medium term. One M.2 is nuts, and frankly, so is gigabit ethernet, along with manufacturers offering a single x1 slot beyond the x16 one. Nvme costs are low enough the SATA SSD argument doesn't hold water, 2.5 GbE costs pennies more, and a x4 slot should be had on micro-ATX boards.
This seems deliberate from the scumbag MB makers in making the lower margin A620 unpalatable enough they force you into a B650.
I think that's the real reason these boards have no competition. For AM4, users could use their old B450 boards after a month of waiting for firmware updates. There was a huge ecosystem of existing B450, even B350 boards to use. So A520 boards had to have more features. This is not the case for the A620, if you want to use the newest chips, these will be your cheapest choices and nothing else. Once we get cheap CPUs (and I don't mean $230 "cheap") and sales pick up, I suspect more boards will be released with better features.... even if those boards will be using, say, A720 chipsets instead.
Chiset ????????
or maybe Shitset for the price
:)
A620 has capabilities similar to X570*, but is being 'built' as basically a cut-down B550.
(*sans OCing and Bifurcation. assumption on the latter)
It almost seems like board partners are trying to not cannibalize their AM4 offerings.
hmmmm:May 11, 2022