AMD Entry-level A620 Chipset Nears Launch, Promises Motherboards Starting at $125

[Chrispy_]

Are they stripping out PBO? Most A520 boards lacked it, but most A520 boards were used with APUs or 65W chips.

I don't care about overclocking, AMD do that already with their default 230W PPT and 95C temperature target; What I want is to see is ECO modes or the ability to reduce PPT/TCD/EDC because 230W boost at 95C is horrible for an air cooler that is going to be screaming constantly as it tries to cope. Most AM4 systems using 120mm coolers were fine at the stock 142W PPT, and we know from the 7000-series non-X reviews that the 230W PPT is really only of benefit for rendering and synthetic all-core loads. A 105W ECO mode will likely get most of the way to peak all-core boost on 170W chips anyway, the difference is likely to be only 100MHz for something like a 7700X3D.

 

[Assimilator]

Are they stripping out PBO? Most A520 boards lacked it, but most A520 boards were used with APUs or 65W chips.

I don't care about overclocking, AMD do that already with their default 230W PPT and 95C temperature target; What I want is to see is ECO modes or the ability to reduce PPT/TCD/EDC because 230W boost at 95C is horrible for an air cooler that is going to be screaming constantly as it tries to cope. Most AM4 systems using 120mm coolers were fine at the stock 142W PPT, and we know from the 7000-series non-X reviews that the 230W PPT is really only of benefit for rendering and synthetic all-core loads. A 105W ECO mode will likely get most of the way to peak all-core boost on 170W chips anyway, the difference is likely to be only 100MHz for something like a 7700X3D.

A bigger question: will the A620 boards be physically capable (in terms of power circuitry) of supporting 7900X and future higher-core-count models? With AMD running the X-series AM5 chips to the wall to make them appear faster than they actually are (effectively overclocking them out of the box) the demands on VRMs etc. would appear at a glance to be far higher than those of AM4 - which might well explain the $125 starting price.

 

[Chrispy_]

A bigger question: will the A620 boards be physically capable (in terms of power circuitry) of supporting 7900X and future higher-core-count models? With AMD running the X-series AM5 chips to the wall to make them appear faster than they actually are (effectively overclocking them out of the box) the demands on VRMs etc. would appear at a glance to be far higher than those of AM4 - which might well explain the $125 starting price.

That will depend entirely on the board partners. 230W PPT is almost certainly a factor in raising the price, but they could do what OEMs like HP/Dell etc do and just put a cheap, weak VRM on the board and throttle the CPU in the BIOS.

If that's the case, Motherboard reviews will become more interesting and relevant to the average Joe again.

 

[Dirt Chip]

That will depend entirely on the board partners. 230W PPT is almost certainly a factor in raising the price, but they could do what OEMs like HP/Dell etc do and just put a cheap, weak VRM on the board and throttle the CPU in the BIOS.

If that's the case, Motherboard reviews will become more interesting and relevant to the average Joe again.

It is a very bad move to make entry level mobo to support top end CPU at full load and make you pay for it.
If Intel can do mobo`s for 100$ or less that technically support 13900KS that is a 350w+ so can AMD, if they will.
No one expecting to get full performance with high end CPU on low end mobo.
With low end mobo you just need to do fine with the none x single digit cores CPU`s, support PCIE-4, some up to date USB3 and do OK with memory. that's all.

 

[ThomasK]

X3D chips better be very good to be worth the whole platform upgrade.

 

[Chrispy_]

It is a very bad move to make entry level mobo to support top end CPU at full load and make you pay for it.
If Intel can do mobo`s for 100$ or less that technically support 13900KS that is a 350w+ so can AMD, if they will.
No one expecting to get full performance with high end CPU on low end mobo.
With low end mobo you just need to do fine with the none x single digit cores CPU`s, support PCIE-4, some up to date USB3 and do OK with memory. that's all.

Well, the Intel approach is the one I think AMD partners might take with A620.

If you plop a pin-compatible 13900KS into a cheap H610 motherboard, it'll work, but it'll be restricted to whatever the max PL1 and PL2 the motherboard BIOS can supply. Putting a 350W CPU into a board that only delivers 130W isn't a problem, it just means you're not getting the most out of that particular CPU.

 

[john_]

Literally your average AMD user when you dont buy an AMD CPU+GPU along with 10 shares of AMD stock

Average Intel/Nvidia user the last 10-15 years
"Please AMD build something good enough to push Intel and Nvidia to drop prices, so i can buy cheaper Intel and Nvidia products".

If AMD wants to sell like that they need to be competitive. They have a long history of being the runner up, being late to the competition, and severe driver issues. Some of that history is warranted, some isnt, but its a stigma that AMD has not helped to fix in recent years.

It doesn't matter what AMD offers for some people, because they will always find an excuse to pay for Nvidia and Intel parts, even when AMD options are better in performance, in value or in both. People buy more expensive RTX 3050 over RX 6600. I am pretty sure all of those need CUDA.

What is the best? The most powerful? Because the last time AMD had the most powerful option was......2013 with the 290x. That was a DECADE AGO.

The most stable? Bruh that is not a road you want to travel on with AMD.

Best support? Ditto. Remember what happened to evergreen GPU users, or when GCN was let go VS kepler.

Best bang for dollar? Well AMD used to have that, but now gouges for all but the high end, just like nvidia (remember, the 6700xt was 20% faster and 20% more expensive then the 5700xt, the RX 5500xt was the first example of Gimpgate, ece.) Being a premium brand is more important then supplying the market with good perf/$ for AMD, lisa has stated as such.

RT? Well that's obvious. Other non gaming features? Again, favor for nvidia or now intel.

Sorry, but AMD has been playing second fiddle for too long, and if they do not have a performance advantage over nvidia they're not going to achieve market parity. The halo effect is real. Looks at CPUs, even though ryzen 1000/2000/3000 couldnt match intel's gaming performance you saw metric tons of gaming PCs with ryzen in them simply because they had the bigger numbers on some graphs,a nd once AMD stole the gaming crown intel's sales flatlined.

This would happen in GPUs, but AMD has never had the smash home run over nvidia that they managed on intel, mostly because nvidia has never fallen asleep for half a decade.

Yes and tech press had done everything possible to make 290X look problematic in their reviews. And while having the strongest model in the market is a huge marketing card, AMD ALWAYS HAD BETTER options in lower prices points than Nvidia. But there was always an excuse for many people to buy/promote the more expensive Nvidia model and trash AMD's options.

I don't care anymore about excuses other throw. And you have thrown so many here. I mean, in 20 years we can find one example here of unoptimised driver, one example for a driver problem there, one example for a product that didn't perform well, one example of something else and just generalize that this is something normal for ALL AMD's products in all it's history. Then we can forget Nvidia graphics cards dying, Nvidia cards overheating, Nvidia cheating in drivers, Nvidia paying developers to screw up a game to run worst on the competition, Nvidia paying developers to cancel an update that supports a feature of the competition, Nvidia locking features when their card is not the primary card, forget Nvidia's own driver problems and probably now swallow it's pricing policy by calling it "AMD's fault".

Well, from now and on I am going to be opening champagnes every time Nvidia announces a new overpriced model and people scream at the comments. Enjoy the Nvidia monopoly.

Serious question, in what way is AMD the "best" option? The 7900xtx is a better buy then the 4080, but other then that it was always a compromise, better raster with lower power use but terrible RT performance.

Never. Don't worry. Never. But while I was creaming about RT performance when RX 7900XT/X came out, even called an Nvidia shill, I have to say that it is funny calling "terrible RT performance" what was "great RT performance" just 6 months ago. Because 7900XTX does perform on par with 3080/Ti if I am not mistaken, in RT.


Anyway. Champagnes for me, Nvidia high prices for the rest.
Enjoy monopoly. The problem of course with monopoly is, that you'll have to start blaming Nvidia now. I know it will be a new and difficult experience, but give it time.


PS Intel save us!!!!!

X3D chips better be very good to be worth the whole platform upgrade.

They will be, but not as much as many believe. 7000 series CPUs already have more cache than 5000, so the impact of 3D cache shouldn't be as obvious as with the 5800X3D. People expect 30% I think. Probably we will see something between 5-15%. But that's just a prediction from me. I could be wrong.

 

[ColinB123]

Asrock is a budget brand board manufacture for people who can't afford better.

I reckon I get better value for an extra $50 spent on a PSU, than being forced to spend that extra on a mobo.
"Can't afford better" can be applied to any purchase anyone makes: so it adds no value.
Sometimes better value is provided by the total set of components.

Personally, I found an AsRock B450 a very good match for an R5 3600, and was astonished by how quickly (and often) AsRock implemented the latest BIOS updates from AMD.
I found that support most valuable. I've since "moved on" - but only because I got a second-hand deal I couldn't resist!

 

[john_]

While Asrock does have that "budget option" reputation, they do offer sometimes really great products or new features that others don't have. They also have some products that don't fit in the "budget" category, like Taichi models, but look more like premium stuff and they really are premium stuff.

I had only good experiences with Asrock boards. Never a bad one. If I was looking at 4 boards with the same price, an Asrock, an MSI, an Asus and a Gigabyte, I wouldn't have a problem going with the Asrock one. The only board unknown to me, is Biostar.

 

[Assimilator]

Yes and tech press had done everything possible to make 290X look problematic in their reviews.

No they didn't. The 290X was a hot, noisy power hog and it was rightly called out as such. It soundly beat NVIDIA's offerings at the time, but it was definitely not a perfect card. The fact that you choose to misremember this fact is a problem with you, not the "tech press".

But while I was creaming about RT performance when RX 7900XT/X came out, even called an Nvidia shill, I have to say that it is funny calling "terrible RT performance" what was "great RT performance" just 6 months ago. Because 7900XTX does perform on par with 3080/Ti if I am not mistaken, in RT.

Is AMD's RT performance massively increased? Absolutely.
Is that performance increase extremely impressive in a single generation? Indeed.
Should AMD be commended for this? Yup.

But the fact of the matter remains that nobody apart from you cares that AMD is greatly improved, they - rightly - care that AMD still isn't able to beat NVIDIA in either rasterisation or ray tracing performance. Being able to perform on par with the previous generation of the competitor is not the plus point you seem to think it is, especially when AMD's new cards cost so much more than NVIDIA's older ones.

 

[john_]

No they didn't. The 290X was a hot, noisy power hog and it was rightly called out as such. It soundly beat NVIDIA's offerings at the time, but it was definitely not a perfect card. The fact that you choose to misremember this fact is a problem with you, not the "tech press".

Thank you for proving my point, even if you think you do the opposite.
"Don't look at performance, look at the temps". Thank you.

Is AMD's RT performance massively increased? Absolutely.
Is that performance increase extremely impressive in a single generation? Indeed.
Should AMD be commended for this? Yup.

But the fact of the matter remains that nobody apart from you cares that AMD is greatly improved, they - rightly - care that AMD still isn't able to beat NVIDIA in either rasterisation or ray tracing performance. Being able to perform on par with the previous generation of the competitor is not the plus point you seem to think it is, especially when AMD's new cards cost so much more than NVIDIA's older ones.

Oh my God. You understood the opposite, didn't you? Oh my....

 

[Ruru]

They should have at least some tweaking capabilities at that price point. I mean, 125USD for an entry-level chipset board is just expensive.

 

[john_]

Companies seem to be abandoning the sub $100 market. We have seen it in GPUs, we might see it in CPUs and motherboards in the near future. Today, while Intel does offer boards cheaper than $100, they are still much more expensive than in the past. In my country, for example, LGA 1700 boards start at 72 euros, while LGA 1200 boards start at 57 euros. If I limit my search to ATX boards, excluding microATX boards that are the cheapest, LGA 1700 starts at 125 euros, while LGA 1200 at 131 euros. Basically the same starting point for ATX boards, but clearly above 100 euros. Looking at AM4 boards, even there prices have gone considerably up. ATX start at 100 euros, while in the past finding an ATX at under 70 euros wasn't that difficult. MicroATX AM4 boards start at 59 euros, when in the past someone could find at lower than 50 euros a few cheap models, even 1-2 with B450.
With the exception of DDR4 memory and SSDs, PCs are becoming more expensive.

 

[Crylune]

Reminds me of first gen Ryzen fuckups all over again. I'll wait for Zen 5 3D V-cache. My 5800X3D is fine. None of the new CPUs are worth the upgrade, not even the X3D Zen 4s.

 

[mb194dc]

Again why bother over AM4? For almost all use cases it's better value.

 

[Chrispy_]

They should have at least some tweaking capabilities at that price point. I mean, 125USD for an entry-level chipset board is just expensive.

I'd like PBO as a bare-minimum. It's not just for overclocking, it's control of how hot/noisy you want your system and IMO that's even more important on budget hardware than it is on the enthusiast platforms, which are typically over-built with an abundance of cooling.

 

[N3M3515]

Asrock is a budget brand board manufacture for people who can't afford better.

Really? That's cheap?
Holy crap....

Serious question, in what way is AMD the "best" option?

About 1 - 2 months ago and for several months straight, the whole rx 6000 was a better buy than nvidias rtx 3000 series in every segment but the halo one. They offered considerably better raster and about equal rt than their equal priced nvidia gpus counterparts.

Right now, both are ofering crazy high scalper prices.

 

[Sabishii Hito]

People really never heard of Asrock's OC Formula boards that were highly regarded among the enthusiast overclocker crowd?

 

[wheresmycar]

by now i was expecting "decent" ~$150 B-series boards. $125 for A620's doesn't sound investable for the 3 year+ support plan. So i turn to the know-hows...

1. For a gaming setup paired with a non-X CPU and then down the support plan a couple of Gens ahead upgrading to something like a 8-core X3D, would these A-series boards be sufficient to handle the onslaught?

2. I generally just need a fast system NVME SSD, a secondary SATA SSD for game storage and then a third SSD/HD for all sorts.... for optimal performance, will these A-series boards suffice if i were to add a 4th storage device down the line?

3. For gaming purposes, does the A620 paired with a 7600 (or might even jump on the 7800X3D) and then moving up the support ladder to something like a potential 9800X3D present any other drawbacks? I'm not interested in overclocking other than dialing in sweet-spot driven RAM tune-ups from default.

If equitable, i'd fancy going AM5 this time around rather then being tied into dead-platforms where i can't scratch the upgrade itch and the $125 investment would be great providing the 2-gen succeeding upgrade fits the bill without being taxed for performance/compatibility issues

 

[Ruru]

I'd like PBO as a bare-minimum. It's not just for overclocking, it's control of how hot/noisy you want your system and IMO that's even more important on budget hardware than it is on the enthusiast platforms, which are typically over-built with an abundance of cooling.

Exactly. I don't OC my 3600 manually, I let PBO to do its magic. But at least PBO with some options would be nice, even they are A620 boards, and Ax20 isn't OC supported.

 

[pavle]

Another wonder from Adios My Dineros & Co. Just for you.

 

[Redwoodz]

Inflation. Stop blaming AMD/ ASRock for global problems. I pay $5.00 for a loaf of white bread.

 

[Ruru]

Inflation. Stop blaming AMD/ ASRock for global problems. I pay $5.00 for a loaf of white bread.

Yet the wages doesn't rise, at least not as much as prices. It's more than understandable for consumers to complain about the higher prices.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I'm really torn on this because, sure, something like 90% of people don't overclock so it doesn't make sense for them to pay more for an overclocking motherboard. At the same time, these boards are REALLY stripped down when it comes to features and the price drop is far too small to be worth it.

One thing that I would NEVER pay more for would be an X670E or B650E because PCI-Express v4.0 had just come out ONE generation ago. Paying more for PCI-e5 so soon after PCI-e4 was released strikes me as nuts because 4 is blazingly fast. For 99% of applications (like any video card that isn't an RX 6500 "XT"), even PCI-e3 still works just fine. My gaming NVMe drives are both PCI-e3 and my load times in Cyberpunk 2077 are all between 10 and 15 seconds. The limiting factor of the HDD these days are the spinning platters, not the interfaces. Since an HDD can't spin fast enough to saturate SATA-III, there's no point in making faster interfaces for them. The PCI-e version might make some difference but from what I've seen, the differences aren't significant, especially since something else in the system will just bottleneck it anyway (like the CPU or RAM).

Hardware Unboxed/Techspot did a big game load time test and discovered that as long as you're using an SSD, it doesn't matter what the interface type is. The TLR version is that, across ALL tested SSDs (PCI-e3 & PCI-e4 NVMe and both 2.5" and M.2 SATA-III), the total load time delta between the "best" and "worst" were as follows:

Horizon Zero Dawn - 5.7 seconds
Death Stranding - 1.8 seconds
Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 2.1 seconds
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 1.2 seconds
Borderlands 3 - 2.1 seconds
The Outer Worlds - 1.5 seconds
AC: Odyssey - 2.3 seconds
The Division 2 - 6.6 seconds
Planet Coaster - 25.9 seconds*

*Planet Coaster's increase of 25.9 seconds isn't significant because the actual load times were 366.3 seconds - 392.2 seconds which makes it an increase of only 7%.

This makes it pretty clear that any AM5 chipset with an "E" on the end isn't worth paying extra for (at this point in time). Here's the kicker though, these motherboard manufacturers have just been bending consumers over for the sake of it when it comes to these AM5 boards. This is clearly because they know that the longevity of AM5 would mean reduced motherboard sales for them just like AM4 theoretically did (although AM4's popularity probably meant that they actually sold more). Oh sure, they claim that it's because of what AMD is charging them for the AM5 chipsets but I saw a video from Hardware Unboxed that reviews the cheapest X670 boards around and here are the prices:

Asrock X670E PG Lightning - US$260
Gigabyte X670 Gaming X - US$280
MSi Pro X670-P WiFi - $290
ASUS Prime X670-P WiFi - $290

The fact that ASRock is selling an X670E board for $20-$30 less than the cheapest X670 boards from Gigabyte, MSi and ASUS tells me that the cost of the chipsets has nothing to do with the price of the AM5 motherboards because there's no way that ASRock would've been able to sell an X670E model for less than the cheap X670 boards from other manufacturers. It's just more corporate greed and BS from the other three, as usual.

 

[Assimilator]

Hardware Unboxed/Techspot did a big game load time test and discovered that as long as you're using an SSD, it doesn't matter what the interface type is. The TLR version is that, across ALL tested SSDs (PCI-e3 & PCI-e4 NVMe and both 2.5" and M.2 SATA-III), the total load time delta between the "best" and "worst" were as follows:

Horizon Zero Dawn - 5.7 seconds
Death Stranding - 1.8 seconds
Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 2.1 seconds
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 1.2 seconds
Borderlands 3 - 2.1 seconds
The Outer Worlds - 1.5 seconds
AC: Odyssey - 2.3 seconds
The Division 2 - 6.6 seconds
Planet Coaster - 25.9 seconds*

*Planet Coaster's increase of 25.9 seconds isn't significant because the actual load times were 366.3 seconds - 392.2 seconds which makes it an increase of only 7%.

This is what most consumers, even so-called technology enthusiasts, fail to understand: the thing that makes the difference is the fact is that an SSD is a NAND device, not the interface said SSD communicates via. And NAND's advantage is latency, not bandwidth, so coupling it to higher-bandwidth interfaces... really doesn't make that much of a difference, except in scenarios that are bandwidth-limited... which is very few, mostly non-game ones.

The reason for this of course is that a game isn't comprised of a single huge resource that needs to be loaded (which would be bandwidth-intensive), but of very many small ones - so small and so numerous that they end up saturating the SSD controller's queue depth rather than its bandwidth. DirectStorage was supposed to help with this by bundling those resources together into one big file that your GPU knows how to split out into the smaller ones it needs, thus moving the performance requirement to bandwidth over latency... but it's still AWOL on PCs as far as I can see.

The fact that ASRock is selling an X670E board for $20-$30 less than the cheapest X670 boards from Gigabyte, MSi and ASUS tells me that the cost of the chipsets has nothing to do with the price of the AM5 motherboards because there's no way that ASRock would've been able to sell an X670E model for less than the cheap X670 boards from other manufacturers. It's just more corporate greed and BS from the other three, as usual.

ASRock has traditionally been seen as few tiers lower than the other names you mentioned, with its products priced accordingly.