AMD B650 “budget AM5” motherboards revealed by MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, and ASRock

pcinvasion.com:

AMD and its motherboard partners revealed more about the B650 and B650E platforms today during the “Meet the Experts” event. You may remember the leak from last week that previewed the board designs, but there wasn’t any info on specs or pricing at that time. All of the usual partners including ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and ASRock officially showed off the respective lineups today. Specs were detailed for different models, but pricing has yet to be known.

It’s no secret at this point that AMD’s AM5 platform is pricey if you want to reap the performance of a Ryzen 7000 CPU. You need the processor itself, a compatible cooler with adequate cooling, DDR5 memory, and the new motherboard. Most X670 models revealed thus far have proven pricey, so the hope has been that the B650 platform will provide a cut-down experience that still meets the needs of gamers without all the added costs that professionals and overclockers typically want with high-end platforms.

The main difference you need to know between B650 and B650E is that the latter stands for “Extreme” and comes with a more advanced overall feature set. You can quickly differentiate models by the single letter designation, but the price difference will definitely clue you in as well. It will be up to individual preference which platform is best to buy, but a basic B650 motherboard will do fine for budget builds.

Feature-wise, AMD’s B650 motherboards hit the mark, in part thanks to flexibility. The B650 platform features minimum core specs like a PCIe 4.0 x16 for the primary graphics card slot and at least one PCIe 4.0 x4 slot for an m.2 SSD. However, motherboard manufacturers have a lot of flexibility with how they wish to configure different products. This can scale up to a