A major factor that reduces the appeal of AMD's latest desktop CPUs, the Ryzen 7000 series (opens in new tab), is the price of the motherboard. However, a cheaper AMD chipset is rumored to be in development that could solve this problem and finally deliver the $125 motherboard promised by AMD at the time of the Ryzen 7000's launch.

Motherboards with AMD's existing chipsets for the new AM5 socket, the B650 (open in new tab) and X670 (open in new tab), are currently available for around $160. The problem is that compatible motherboards for Intel's killer Core i5-13400F can be had for about $90.

According to rumors (open in new tab) (via Videocardz (open in new tab)), the solution is the new AMD A620 chipset; the A620 has been rumored for some time, but the latest rumors reveal more details.

Aside from the lower price, the big question is what features will be lost by adopting a cheaper chipset. The most obvious is the loss of PCIe Gen 5 support; the A620 is said to be PCIe Gen 4 only, including all 28 lanes to the CPU socket.

The PCIe link to the chipset itself has also been downgraded from the B650's Gen 4 to a PCIe Gen 3 specification. This affects the bandwidth available for the various features hanging from the chipset, such as USB sockets.

Allegedly, the A620 operates with just two USB 3.2 Gen 2, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 links, and six USB 2.0 sockets; the B650 has up to four USB 3.2 Gen 2, along with six USB 2.0, one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 high bandwidth ports are also supported.

Another major omission of the A620 is said to be CPU overclocking support. Memory overclocking is listed in the feature set. However, if the CPU is locked, it matters little.

It is not certain if overclocking by base clock is possible. However, if overclocking is an important feature for you, it goes without saying that you need access to unlocked CPU multipliers rather than messing with the base clock.

As for memory support, given that the memory controller is in the CPU and not the chipset, one would assume that the A620 will not affect this area and will still be locked to DDR5 RAM only.

Given the above, the rumored downgrade is reasonably acceptable and will not directly affect gaming performance. However, the A620 does not seem to be the best option for those who value SSD performance or connect a lot of bandwidth-heavy peripherals via USB.