Gamers hoping to build a Ryzen 9000-series system with an affordable B850 motherboard are set for a long wait
Gamers hoping to build a new Ryzen 9000-series system with an affordable B850 or B840 motherboard will reportedly have quite a wait according to a report from ComputerBase. Motherboards with the budget-friendly chipsets are unlikely to debut before 2025.
X870 and X870E options set to reach the market in the coming weeks, though given their features and specs, they are certainly not going to be cheap.
AMD always indicated it would stagger the release of the new chipsets. Still, it's a bit disappointing to have such a long delay, as B850 boards in particular would no doubt add some additional incentive for mainstream users to upgrade.
Of course, you can use any currently available B650 or B650E motherboard (or A620 board for that matter) with a CPU like the Ryzen 5 9600X or Ryzen 7 9700X, but there's always the potential stumbling block of it not having an updated BIOS with support for the new chips. Not every board features a CPU-less BIOS flashback option.
At a recent media event attended by PC Gamer, AMD revealed the base specifications of B850 motherboards. They don't appear to be a drastic improvement over B650E motherboards, but the inclusion of Gen 5 NVMe SSD support and 20Gbps USB will elevate them over cheaper B650 options. These boards are also likely to feature WiFi 7 and more powerful VRM and cooling solutions—at least on the more premium models.
B840 motherboards look to be less exciting, and may even be a downgrade compared to A620 motherboards. Such boards are unlikely to be released until well into 2025, but AMD's preliminary PCIe Gen 3 spec is not going to appeal to anyone except for those on a very tight budget. That could limit them when used with graphics cards using an x8 or x4 PCIe link, which are just the kinds of cards gamers on a budget are likely to use.
We saw X870 boards shown off at Computex nearly three months ago, so we can expect to see B850 boards teased towards the end of the year, with a full showcase at CES 2025 looking very likely.