THE AM4 PLATFORM

AMD’s latest motherboards picked apart for your reading pleasure

THE CHIPSETS

Ryzen has a total of five chipsets, each aimed at a different audience. There’s the top-end X370 chipset, featuring highend support for storage, NVMe devices, and overclocking by default. The B350 is a slightly slimmed down variant of X370, with SLI/ Xfire disabled by default, but still coming overclocked. Then there’s the more budget-oriented A320, with even less USB support, and overclocking disabled. Finally, there are two unreleased chipsets we haven’t seen yet, designed to deal with small form factor devices: X300 and A300.

Although we haven’t seen any X300 or A300 motherboards, their position is actually the most interesting question. Reason being, we’ve already seen Biostar produce an X370 ITX motherboard— arguably one of the smallest mainstream form factors currently available to the computing ecosphere. So, we simply can’t tell at this point how these X300 and A300 chipsets will fit into the climate. However, judging by the limited USB support, and almost non-existent SATA Express support, it could hint at an even smaller motherboard form factor coming down the pipeline, specifically for console-like devices. A potential possibility for the PS5 or Xbox Two? Only time will tell.

AVAILABILITY

At the moment, availability isn’t stellar for the fledgling motherboards, with many AIB partners claiming that they weren’t given enough time or warning about the readiness of Ryzen processors. Most expected 1,000 chips in the first batch, with 10,000 the following month. In fact, AMD launched with 10,000 chips, followed by over a million in the second batch.

Right now, there are 16 X370 boards, ranging from $120 up to $330, all of them ATX; 19 B350 mobos, in a combination of ATX and microATX, available from $70 to $132; and a single A320 board, the Gigabyte GA-A320M-HD2, at $70.