Here's When AMD's Mid-Range B650 And B650E AM5 Motherboard Platforms For Zen 4 Will Launch

AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series arrival is fast approaching, but not everything is arriving at once. AMD announced the launch last month with the first processors set to arrive September 27th. Only the company’s top end X670 and X670E boards will be available at this time as AMD indicated more affordable B650 and B650E motherboards would follow in October.


We will soon have a better sense of how B650 and B650E capabilities will compare to the premium X670 and X670E solutions. AMD is hosting another Meet The Experts event on October 4th which will detail the platforms and showcase specific products from ASUS, ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte, and Biostar.


Naturally, B650 and B650E motherboards will be built around the new AM5 socket. These lower cost solutions may not have as many bells and whistles, but are still expected to offer many of the premium features AM5 brings. New capabilities include DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 connectivity, at least in some capacity. We have already seen a differentiation between X670 and X670E wherein the latter provides PCIe 5.0 to an NVMe slot and two graphics card slots while the former only guarantees the NVMe slot.


It is unclear how exactly B650 and B650E will be differentiated, but we do know some something of the physical difference from the X670 variants. Specifically, the X670 and X670E both use two physical chips to make up their chipset, while the B650 family uses just one. The repercussion is that B650-class motherboards will have half the available I/O onboard.


We have high hopes that AMD's EXPO memory will be supported on B650 and B650E systems. AMD EXPO, or EXtended Profiles for Overclocking, is a new memory overclocking profile akin to Intel's XMP. While EXPO will not be directly interchangeable with XMP, it is functionally identical in practice. Load the EXPO profile in BIOS and—voilà, overclocked memory. The only caveat is that consumers will need to buy specific EXPO profiled memory modules, of which there will be at least 15 kits from various vendors at launch.

We will be sure to follow up with coverage of AMD’s Meet the Experts event covering B650 motherboards to confirm any details that emerge. Upgrading from AM4 to AM5 is already going to be fairly costly as consumers have to spring for a new motherboard and pricier DDR5 memory alongside their new silicon, so we hope B650 offerings can meaningfully reduce the barrier to entry. AMD has indicated there should be offerings available from as little as $125 USD which is much more palatable than the $1,300 MSI Meg X670E Godlike.