A620 chipset is missing features, but (mostly) not the important ones:
If you're trying to build a low-end to midrange gaming PC or workstation with inexpensive but modern parts, it has been hard to recommend AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors. That's partly because Intel's CPUs have offered more cores for similar money, but motherboards with AMD's socket AM5 have remained stubbornly expensive, and their lack of support for DDR4 memory means you'll pay more to get DDR5 RAM.
That may change somewhat thanks to the new entry-level AMD A620 chipset, which the company quietly announced last week. AMD says it should bring the prices of AM5-based motherboards down to around $85, not far north of what low-end Intel-based H610 and B660 motherboards cost, though they'll still require DDR5 (for the DDR5-6000 that AMD recommends for optimal Ryzen performance, the price premium is still not quite double what you'll pay for the same amount of DDR4-3200).
Compared to X670 and B650-based motherboards, A620 chipsets will have more limited connectivity. There's no PCI Express 5.0 support at all for either graphics cards or SSDs—not a huge blow since no GPUs and few SSDs support PCIe 5.0 at this point anyway, but a step back for future-proofing. The processor will still provide enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for a GPU and a single SSD, but the chipset only supports PCIe 3.0 speeds for additional SSDs. The chipset also supports fewer USB ports overall and no 20Gbps USB ports.
Perhaps more significantly, A620 chipsets don't support any kind of processor overclocking, nor do they support the Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) or Curve Optimizer features for automated overclocking or undervolting. This is consistent with past AMD A-series chipsets and non-Z-series Intel chipsets, which have also limited their support for overclocking features. AMD says that memory overclocking will still be supported by "most [motherboard] models."
[...] AMD says that more A620-based boards are coming from the usual suspects—ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Biostar are all planning to release a range of A620 motherboard options.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 04, @02:52PM (2 children)
Given how few stages there are to the VRMs, these will likely not support anything with a TDP over 65W (PPT over 88W) either. I'm personally fine with that, as my use case would be a tiny mini-ITX system with a 7900(non-X) in it, but this is kind of disappointing compared to how AM4 handled things...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 04, @04:41PM
From what I understand, motherboard manufacturers will be permitted to make A620 boards that support higher TDPs, but these could end up being more expensive. Kind of like B650E?
I would be surprised if it can't take a higher TDP CPU and run it in ECO mode automatically, but I didn't look into that yet. When the 65W CPUs were launched, they were more expensive than their 'X' counterparts, temporarily.
Here are the default TDPs so far:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_4#Desktop [wikipedia.org]
Weird how the 7800X3D has lower clock speeds than the 7700X but a higher TDP rating.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 04, @09:33PM
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18800/amd-quietly-launches-a620-platform-sub-100-am5-motherboards [anandtech.com]
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/18800/niETuP5p8ug2twP3yehmMh_575px.jpg [anandtech.com]
These pieces of information lead me to believe that any AM5 CPU will work on A620, as long as the BIOS can be updated to the correct version.
It's known that Zen 4 CPUs limited to a 65W TDP still have great performance. For example:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17585/amd-zen-4-ryzen-9-7950x-and-ryzen-5-7600x-review-retaking-the-high-end/20 [anandtech.com]
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17585/130335.png [anandtech.com]
CineBench R23 Multi-Thread. 7950X at 170W: 38,291. 7950X at 65W: 31,308, or ~81.8%.
Personally, I want to see what a Strix Point desktop APU can do (rumored 8+8 hybrid), and put that in a mini-ITX system. But if you don't care about graphics at all, every desktop CPU so far has the tiny 2 CU iGPU.
Phoenix APUs will include an XDNA machine learning accelerator, which may be coming to Zen 5 desktop CPUs (Granite Ridge). Reviews for the first generation should be coming out soon as Phoenix laptops get reviewed (launch was delayed to April [tomshardware.com]).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 04, @09:04PM (1 child)
For those not paying attention, old SSDs were considered "pretty fast" if they ran a quarter gigabit/sec and the new PCI 5.0 vaporware products run in the ten gigabits/sec range.
In "the old days" it was hard to saturate a 10G ethernet but now there will be single drive SAN/NAS solutions that can indeed saturate a 10G SAN network.
If you trust the vaporware specs and optimistic ship dates for next year.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 04, @09:37PM
SSDs are a disaster:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/kioxia-helpta-level-cell-nand-nearly-2x-capacity-vs-qlc [tomshardware.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]