Boards with B850 and B840 chipsets will come next year
Along with new CPUs based on the Zen 5 architecture, AMD has announced new boards in June, more precisely new chipsets for them, on which the new boards will be based (the CPUs themselves work in all AM5 boards). The date when these boards will come out seems to be clearer now. But this year, we’ll only see the more expensive X870 and X870E models and it will be a longer wait for the cheaper B850 and B840 variants.
The ComputerBase website reports that it has been asking about the arrival of the new boards at the German gaming event Gamescom 2024 and received some information circulating among board manufacturers. According to those, the arrival of the first boards with these new chipsets is scheduled for the end of September. Initially, we might see just a portion of the planned models and more may be added later, though.
However, this date only applies to the two chipsets that AMD officially announced in June – X870 and X870E. These will represent the more expensive, premium-featured platform. Basically it can be said that X870E is the successor of X670E and X670 chipsets, meaning it is a chipset consisting of two Promontory 21 dies plus a separate USB4 controller from ASMedia (ASM4242), which adds USB4 support. The X870E guarantees support for PCIe 5.0×16 (or ×8/×8 split) for a GPU as well as PCIe 5.0×4 for SSDs. With two Promontory 21 dies used, the X870E provides a larger number of SATA and USB ports and PCIe 4.0 lanes routed from the chipset (the same as the X670 and X670E in this trim).
The second chipset, X870, is a bit confusing with its name, because it is actually the successor to the B650E chipset – it consists of only one 21die (but again with an extra USB4 controller) and always has PCI Express 5.0 support. Due to the use of only one chip, the X870 chipset will have fewer PCIe 4.0 lanes coming out of the chipset, fewer USB and SATA ports, but will retain the same PCIe 5.0 lane support from the processor as X870E. So the meaning of the “E” in the designation is now different than in the 600 generation (it used to mean support for PCIe 5.0 lanes coming out of the CPU, but now the “E” instead indicates extended connectivity from the chipset).
The main novelty of X870E and X870 compared to X670E and B650E is the aforementioned USB4 support, which was optional in the previous generation, but it should always be present in these new boards. Also, they should probably often have higher quality PCBs with support for memory overclocking up to DDR5-8000 and features like WiFi 7, which are not capabilities of the chipsets themselves strictly speaking.
Boards with these new chipsets are rumored to often have quite premium features and, like backplates on the back for example. They’ll likely be priced pretty high, so the older 600 generation models may be a quite attractive alternative compared to them thanks to the discounts they went through (analogous to how the older Ryzen 7000 generation now outshines the newer CPUs in price/performance ratio thanks to the deep discounts, albeit at the cost of lower absolute performance).
Mainstream chipsets in January
But if you prefer cheaper boards, for now you’ll have to combine Ryzen 9000s with boards with 600 chipsets (note that there is nothing bad about doing that). New B850 and B840 chipsets for this price segment won’t arrive until 2025, according to ComputerBase. They’ll probably be announced at CES 2025 in January. Real availability of the boards could then follow some time after that.
While these two chipsets have already appeared in documents leaked by board manufacturers in late May and June, AMD has not officially announced them, unlike X870 and X870E, which corresponds with the fact that these models will be released later. However the arrival of the B840 and B850 chipsets was confirmed by an Asus presentation that AMD also attended during Gamescom, and the slides showed the specs of these chipsets.
B850 and B840 specifications are different than originally stated
The B850 chipset will be based on the same Promontory 21 chip as the various variants of the B650, X670 and X870 chipsets. In this case, however, it no longer requires mandatory USB4 support. So what is the difference compared to B650? The boards using the old chipset usually only support PCIe 4.0 ×16 for a graphics card and sometimes PCIe 5.0 ×4 for SSDs – but often the M.2 slots only support PCIe 4.0 ×4. The new B850 platform changes this, with B850 boards requiring one of the M.2 slots for SSDs should to support PCIe 5.0 ×4.
Some boards may also support PCIe 5.0 ×16 for a graphics card, but this is optional (not mandatory). The important thing is that it is not prohibited, though, so there may be some boards that provide this (but not USB4, which would separate them from X870). By the way, leaked documents from May talked about the Gen5 support situation being the other way around, with PCIe 5.0 for graphics cards and PCIe 4.0 for SSDs. The current version of the specs is likely a better idea since SSDs benefit from PCIe 5.0 much more.
SATA, USB and PCIe 4.0 lane port support from the chipset itself is probably unchanged from B650. This chipset still supports USB 20 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2×2). B850 boards, by the way, will support ×8/×8 lane split for graphics cards just like X870 and X870E.
But the B840 chipset will be more of a “novelty” in the sense of how it departs from the current chipset lineup. According to leaked (not yet official) information, it should be based on the older Promontory 19 silicon, which should be the die of the B550 chipset from the AM4 platform.
Connectivity from the chipset should match the B550 chipset – in particular, this means that lanes from the chipset will be limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds only. In addition, USB 20 Gb/s will not be supported, only USB 10 Gb/s is supported. The B550 chipset did not yet support the faster standard (USB 3.2 Gen 2×2). Also, the downlink speed between the CPU and the chipset should be lower (PCIe 3.0 ×4).
According to the specs from Asus, it seems that the restriction to PCI Express 3.0 could even apply to connectivity wired directly from the CPU, so only PCIe 3.0 ×16 for GPUs (and ×8/×8 split won’t be supported) and PCIe 3.0 ×4 for SSDs would be available, and PCI Express 4.0 wouldn’t be available at all with these boards. This again is a change from before, the May leak still suggested that B840 will provide PCIe 4.0 support for GPUs and SSDs (on the CPU’s lanes). These newer specs were shown by Asus on their official slides, so they should be fairly final, though we can’t completely rule out some omission or error in them.
The last and significant thing is that the B840 chipset will reportedly not support overclocking. So in this respect they will be more like and a continuation of the A-series chipsets (A620, A520, A320). It would probably have been better if it was labeled A840. But memory overclocking, either manual or via XMP and EXPO profiles, will be supported.
It’s a question though how much the lower price range needs new boards at all. In this case there is not the benefit of USB4 support being a required feature, so in terms of functionality the comparable B650 and A620 chipsets are pretty similar (or rather the B840 looks strictly worse than the A620), so you probably won’t lose much if you don’t wait for the “800 generation” in the case of B840 and to smaller degree in the case of B850 as well. Especially since boards with 600 generation chipsets usually are priced much lower due to the various discounts theiy received since launch, so they will probably be substantially cheaper than the newly released boards with B850 and B840 chipset.
Source: ComputerBase
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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