It’s taken a while, especially for AMD, but we’re finally seeing recent mainstream and budget motherboards for Zen 5 and Arrow Lake processors at CES. The stars of the show carry the B850 and B860 chipsets, but given that the names are almost identical, there will likely be no end to the confusion that will result in the products being returned to retailers. This is because the B850 is exclusive to AMD and the B860 is exclusive to Intel. Of course.
In the case of the former, AMD actually announced the B850 chipset in July 2024, along with the introduction of the Zen 5 processor architecture, but only now have motherboards using this chipset appeared. ASRockAsus, Gigabyteand MSI are showing off recent models at CES, and I already have one to test.
While all AMD X870/E motherboards come with PCIe 5.0 graphics and basic SSD slots, B850 boards must only support PCIe 4.0 as standard in both cases, although many offer Gen5. A similar story applies to USB4 – mandatory for X870/E boards, optional for B850.
In some cases this can be quite confusing. Take Asus and its ROG Strix B580 motherboards for example. The B850-E Gaming WiFi has a Gen5 GPU and SSD slot (the rest are Gen4) and a 40Gb/s USB4 port; The B850-F Gaming WiFi card has the same Gen5 slots, but there is no USB4 port, only a “normal” 20Gbps USB port.
There’s also the B850-A Wi-Fi Gaming Adapter with a Gen5 graphics card slot, but no Gen5 SSD slot or USB4 port. Ah, but there is also the B850-I Gaming WiFi with a Gen5 GPU socket, two SSD Gen5 slots and no USB4.
To be fair to Asus, it’s not the only motherboard supplier that has a gigantic number of very similar but confusingly specified models on offer. But what makes things worse is the fact that Intel’s recent main chipset for Core Ultra 200S processors is called B860.
The similarity between the codenames means that there will certainly be cases where someone accidentally orders the wrong motherboard – at best it will simply be a quick return to the retailer, and at worst someone will try to jam an AMD processor into an Intel socket and the other way round.
A comparison of both chipsets shows that yes Very similar in features and names. They offer neither PCIe 5.0 lanes (Gen4 only) nor sport USB4 ports (this is done using a separate chip in the case of B850 motherboards).
The Intel B860 has two more PCIe lanes than the AMD B850, but the latter has integrated Wi-Fi 7 while the former uses Wi-Fi 6E (although some B860 boards operate a separate Wi-Fi 7 chip).
At the very bottom of the chipset scale are AMD processors B840 and Intel H810. The latter is better than the former, but unless you’re really working on a very tight budget, neither of these options is a great option for building a budget-friendly gaming PC. You’ll be better off with last-generation products that can be purchased for a much lower price than on launch day.
Since these recent motherboards have just been released, there aren’t many of them in stores yet, so it’s worth waiting a month or two to see what the reviews are like. However, I suspect some of them will be quite costly, so you might be better off buying an X870 or Z890 board if you get more features for the same money. We’ll let you know when we have more information.
