According to the company’s report, gamers looking to build a fresh system with a Ryzen 9000 series processor and an affordable B850 or B840 motherboard will reportedly have to wait a bit. Computer baseMotherboards with budget-friendly chipsets are unlikely to appear before 2025.
The X870 and X870E are expected to launch in the coming weeks, but given their features and specifications, they certainly won’t be low-cost.
AMD has always indicated that it would be staggering the launch of fresh chipsets. Still, it’s a bit disappointing that there’s been such a long delay, as the B850 boards would undoubtedly give average users an extra incentive to upgrade.
Sure, you can exploit any current B650 or B650E motherboard (or A620 board) with a processor like the Ryzen 5 9600X or Ryzen 7 9700X, but there’s always the potential issue of not having an updated BIOS to support the fresh chips. Not every board has the option to flash the BIOS without a CPU.
During a recent media event attended by PC Gamer, AMD revealed the base specs for the B850 motherboards. They don’t seem like a drastic improvement over the B650E motherboards, but the inclusion of Gen 5 NVMe SSD support and 20Gbps USB will elevate them above the cheaper B650 options. These boards will also likely feature WiFi 7 and more capable VRM and cooling solutions — at least on the more premium models.
B840 motherboards seem less thrilling and could even be a downgrade from A620 motherboards. These boards probably won’t be released before the end of 2025, but AMD’s initial PCIe Gen 3 spec won’t appeal to anyone except those on a very tight budget. This could limit their exploit with graphics cards that exploit an x8 or x4 PCIe link, which are exactly the types of cards that budget gamers are likely to exploit.
The X870 motherboards were introduced at Computex almost three months ago, so we can expect to see the B850 motherboards announced later this year. It’s very likely that the full reveal will take place at CES 2025.
