Following the B650 motherboard belatedly hitting AMD's goal of $125 (open in new tab), news of an even cheaper $85 board has come in. This time, however, the low price is due to the new cheap A620 chipset.

According to AMD, the A620 chipset is available today and offers key features of the existing AM5 platform, including DDR5 support, one-click memory overclocking, and up to 32x PCIe 4 lanes.

Note that this is memory overclocking, not CPU overclocking, and PCIe Gen 4, not PCIe Gen 5. The latter is 2x faster and is only available on existing B550 and X670 chipsets. Therefore, the A620 does not support PCIe Gen 5 SSDs.

The A620 also has narrow bandwidth between the CPU socket and the chipset itself, with only eight PCIe Gen 3 lanes; the B650 has eight Gen 4 lanes and four Gen 3 lanes, while the X670 has 12 Gen 4 and eight more Gen 3 lanes.

As a result, USB connectivity is a bit compromised on the A620: the B650 has six USB 3.2 Gen 2 interfaces, while the A620 has only two USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections. The X670 has 12 USB 3.2 Gen 1 and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 support. Is that all?

Still, the A620 supports four memory DIMMs like its bigger siblings. However, CPU overclocking is not available. Other features do not include XFR2 Enhanced, a kind of automatic overclocking tool, or Precision Boost Overdrive, a more practical overclocking tool.

In other words, the A620 is fairly basic, but if you are not interested in overclocking and do not need to connect high-bandwidth USB peripherals, it should be fine.

Incidentally, PCIe Gen 4 limitations will not be much of an issue. Also, the latest PCIe Gen 5 SSDs offer enormous sequential performance, but the 7GB/s of Gen 4 drives is hardly inferior. These newer Gen 5 drives don't seem to be moving the needle much with respect to random 4K performance either. [The Gigabyte A620M Gaming X above is one of the first A620 boards to appear, but Gigabyte has yet to release full specs. Of note, however, is the M.2 drive slot. Single slots may be common on these inexpensive boards. It may suit your needs. Or it may not. Please note that.