It's taken a while to happen, especially in the case of AMD, but at long last, we're seeing new mainstream and budget motherboards for Zen 5 and Arrow Lake processors at CES.
The stars of the show sport the B850 and B860 chipsets, but given that the names are almost identical, there's probably going to be no end of confusion resulting in products being returned to retailers.
That's because B850 is AMD-only and B860 is Intel-only. Obviously. In the case of the former, AMD actually announced the B850 chipset back in July 2024, with the launch of the Zen 5 CPU architecture, but it's taken until now for motherboards using it to appear.
ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are all showing off new models at CES, and I have one in for testing already. While AMD X870/E motherboards all come with PCIe 5.0 graphics card and primary SSD slots, B850 boards are only required to support PCIe 4.0 for both as standard, though many offer Gen5.
It's a similar story regarding USB4—mandatory for X870/E boards, optional for B850. In some cases, it can be quite confusing.