Last year, when AMD released the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs (opens in new tab) and the new AM5 platform, AMD announced that the motherboard prices would start at $125. In fact, prices started much higher than that, and it is only now that AMD's promise has been realized.

Strangely enough, AMD itself cried out for new pricing and blamed itself for the delay in meeting the $125 goal.

The $125 board in question comes from ASRock, which offers attractively priced PC components: the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 sells for exactly $124.99 on Newegg (opens in new tab).

For starters, this is a Micro-ATX board, which automatically limits its connectivity. So there are only two DIMM slots for memory, a total of seven USB ports, and four SATA sockets; the Realtek ALC897 audio chip is not state-of-the-art, but there is a 2.5Gb Ethernet port, DisplayPort, HDMI, USB-C . So, in practice, most connectivity needs are fairly well covered.

Even better, there is an M.2 Wi-Fi slot and antenna attachment point, allowing for a wireless network setup of your choice. Of course, this comes at a cost. But if you already have an M.2 E Wi-Fi card, you can transfer it to this new board. In any case, given the price point, one would not expect Wi-Fi to come standard on this board. [However, the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 looks like a viable option, especially thanks to its dual M.2 storage slots.

DDR5 memory has also dropped in price significantly since the Ryzen 7000 was released, making the three-piece set of cutting-edge mobo, CPU, and memory from AMD quite affordable. Unfortunately, however, the last piece of the puzzle, graphics, remains painfully expensive.

In fact, you can get this motherboard, a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU (open in new tab), and 32GB of DDR5 RAM for about $600. This is much cheaper than the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT by itself, even though the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT has dropped in price to $799 (open in new tab). This is why.