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

AMD’s entry-level A620 chipset for Socket AM5 motherboards is nearing launch, as manufacturers such as GIGABYTE and ASUS have started regulatory filing their upcoming products with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). These would hopefully bring the starting prices of AM5 motherboards down to the USD $125 figure AMD promised. AMD will sufficiently differentiate A620 from the B650, using features such as the lack of CPU overclocking capabilities, only a handful PCIe Gen 3 downstream lanes, and the lack of PCIe Gen 5 on both the PEG and CPU-attached M.2 slots (which could at least be limited to Gen 4 if not Gen 3).

While the motherboards themselves may be cheap, the overall platform costs may still end up higher than Intel’s H610 or upcoming H710 chipsets; as Socket AM5 lacks DDR4 memory support, and even at the entry-level you’ll be forced to buy DDR5. That said, what A620 promises is platform longevity, that the platform will support future processor generations even 5 years from now. AMD dropped a major hint on A620 chipset motherboards availability in its 2023 CES Keynote address, when it pointed to “65 W CPUs and entry-level motherboards” alongside each other. The 65 W Ryzen 7000 series processors are already out, which means A620 should be just around the corner. February 2023 is when AMD looks to launch its high-end Ryzen 7000X3D processors.