The Ultimate AMD AM5 Motherboard Guide

Final Thoughts

There’s clearly a lot to love about this next generation of hardware from AMD. I’m glad to see popular and existing technologies moving forward, ensuring much of the hardware you already own is still supported. Your current SATA and M.2 storage, for example. Furthermore, pretty much all your AM4 socket coolers will still be compatible, albeit some of them may need a special kit, but brands such as Noctua are already offering these free of charge to their customers. So your current storage, graphics cards, and coolers will all be able to move forward, as will your PSU and PC cases too, actually.

Next-Gen Networking

Also, we see AMD embrace some other technologies, such as the latest WiFi 6E technology, giving us faster than gigabit wireless performance on almost all of these new motherboards. There’s also a shift away from 1Gbps ports to at least 2.5Gbps LAN, again, this is on pretty much all of the motherboards too, with some of the high-end ones even pushing 10Gbps ports now. There’s also a broad adoption of USB4 with the latest Type-C 3.2 Gen 2×2 and even some Thunderbolt support on the most extreme boards too, putting AMD and Intel on a level in terms of connectivity.

Next-Gen Hardware

Of course, there’s a wave of new technologies here too, and AMD have fully embraced the latest DDR5 standard, as there will be no DDR4 options for the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs or any of the compatible motherboard chipsets for them; X670E, X670, B650E, and B650. There’s also PCIe 5.0 support on all the new motherboards, even the most affordable models will have this feature, albeit, it’s distributed differently. The most high-end have both PCIe storage and graphics support, with mid-range boards offering the same but with fewer ports and the more affordable models provide storage or graphics but not both. However, as we’ve seen so far if it’s a choice of GPU or SSD PCIe 5.0, the motherboard makers are rightly choosing storage, as there aren’t any PCIe 5.0 GPUs right now anyway. However, being able to tap into the latest SSDs that could see read speeds of 13000 MB/s is certainly appealing.

AM5 is Here to Stay

AMD and their AM5 technology look set for great things. With improved memory support and new memory overclocking technologies both on the chipset and inherent with DDR5. There’s now more power delivery available to the CPU socket, and that seems to be backed up by a stronger focus on higher quality power delivery components and VRM cooling pretty much across the board. Plus, with the increased bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 and a lot more PCIe 4.0 ports, USB Type-C, the fastest networking standards, and more, it’s easy to see that AM5 is built to last for many years to come. Just like AM4, AMD plans to support this platform for several CPU generations, and we can’t wait to see what all this new hardware can do going forward!