Gigabyte A620I AX review
I love a good Mini-ITX motherboard. As someone who tests tech for a living, I'm fortunate to play with some seriously high end kit, but I still love it when a capable bargain board crosses my desk. Not everyone needs or wants a motherboard that costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Sometimes an entry level option can throw up a surprise or two.
It's a no frills board that's built to house a single graphics card, an SSD or two, and a mainstream memory kit
The Gigabyte A620I AX is very much an entry level Mini-ITX option. As the name suggests, it is built around AMD's budget A620 chipset. Even an ATX A620 option won't come with the goodies of the premium chipsets, while Mini-ITX A620 boards have to sacrifice even more. You won't find PCIe 5.0 or CPU overclocking support, and you'll have to give up usable PCIe lanes, SATA ports and fast USB.
As you might have guessed after reading that, the Gigabyte A620I AX isn't what you'd call a feature rich board, but at $139 / £162 / AU$259, you wouldn't expect it to be. A mid-range option like the MSI MPG B650I Edge WiFi I reviewed recently costs nearly twice as much, and an X670 board will set you back even more. The Gigabyte A620I is a no frills board that's built to house a single graphics card, an SSD or two, and a mainstream memory kit with a standard set of peripherals.
The A620I AX won't win any beauty contests. Not that looks matter much in a small form factor system when the board is often hidden. It's a socket AM5 board that supports AMD Ryzen 7000 and 8000-series processors. The good news is, Gigabyte has already released a Zen 5 supporting BIOS, and given that AMD has stated it plans to support AM5 for some time yet, there's every chance you'll be able to insert a Zen 6 chip into it a couple of years from now.
Socket: AMD AM5
CPU compatibility: AMD Ryzen 7000 / 8000-series processors
Form factor: Mini-ITX
Memory support: DDR5-6400(OC), up to 96GB
Storage: 1x M.2, 2x SATA
USB: Up to 1x USB 10Gbps, 5x USB 5Gbps, 5x
