AMD rather unexpectedly introduced its entry-level A620 platform for its AM5 processors late last week. The new platform is designed to power inexpensive PCs using AMD’s CPUs in the AM5 package based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture and reduce costs. It omits overclocking, any kind of PCIe Gen5 connectivity, and support for USB 3.2 Gen2x2. Most importantly, the base AMD A620 based motherboard does not support higher wattage CPUs.
Disabling some connections is intended to simplify testing and validation procedures, as well as the design of real motherboards. On the platform hardware side of things in question, the AMD A620 chipset uses the same Promontory 21 silicon as the more expensive B650 and X670 chipsets, but in this case AMD has cut back on some of the features the silicon supports. In particular, the A620 does not support 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2x2, only supports 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes (the number of lanes enabled may vary, depending on your exact motherboard configuration), and two 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2 port and two 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports only.
When it comes to motherboard design, AMD doesn’t oblige partners to support processors with TDP greater than 65W, so in many cases (if not most) A620-based mainboards run Ryzen 7000X or Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs. Not supported.our colleagues tom’s hardware AMD doesn’t explicitly ban motherboard makers from supporting high wattage gaming processors on motherboards powered by the A620, but the platform is meant to be cheap, so sophisticated voltages We can only guess if there are many A620 mainboards with adjustment modules. For high-end CPUs.
On the bright side, A620 based motherboards will support factory overclocked memory with EXPO profiles up to DDR5-6000. Not sure if it’s possible to manually tune the memory further.
Also, the A620 platform does not support CPU-enabled PCIe Gen5 x4 and x16 interconnects, it only features PCIe Gen4 speeds, which reduces manufacturing costs. It still supports four 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2 ports enabled by the CPU.
Given that there are no client GPUs supporting the PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, it is unlikely to change for at least a year, and the advantages of PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs over SSDs with PCIe 4.0 x4 interfaces are minimal. For games that support DirectStorageit seems reasonably practical to choose PCIe 4.0 speeds instead of PCIe 5.0 on cheaper platforms.
When it comes to the cheap AMD AM5 platform in general, AMD only has three AM5 processors with 65W TDP, including the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700, and the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600. be careful.current cost $229, not particularly cheap. Plus, it has a very low-end integrated GPU, so you’ll need a discrete graphics card, which is also not cheap these days.
As for actual A620 motherboard prices, only ASRock currently offers two such platforms in the US. $86and another price is $100 and new eggOn the other hand, it remains to be seen just how cheap or expensive similar A620-based platforms from manufacturers like Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI will be.
Of course, AMD will release a cheaper AM5 APU with decent embedded graphics, and AMD’s A620 platform will definitely come in handy then. with the latter likely opting for a Ryzen 7000X chip with enhanced performance and overclocking support, or a Ryzen 7000X3D processor with extended cache for great single thread performance. The more advanced he would benefit from a B650 powered motherboard. That said, we can only guess how popular the AMD A620 platform will become before AMD rolls out its cheaper AM5 processors.
