AMD's A620 chipset is more powerful than you might expect from the current boards

It was recently announced that the motherboards with the AMD A620 chipset announced on Friday will not be able to use all of the chipset's features. This naturally makes the chipset look much worse than it actually is. The AMD A620 chipset has some rather arbitrary-seeming limitations implemented by AMD itself. However, motherboard manufacturers have also contributed to the platform's overall unattractiveness.

Although the platform could be quite acceptable for a budget build, the manufacturers have failed to make it more attractive. A comparison of AMD's feature matrix shows that quite a few features have been removed compared to the B650 chipset. Nevertheless, two 10 Gbit/s USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports can be implemented, for example. Although this is possible, only Biostar and Gigabyte have each implemented such a port. ASUS, ASRock and MSI have unfortunately dispensed with it altogether.

The platform we are talking about here is limited to 65-Watt CPUs. This can cause some problems, as potential buyers looking for a cheap motherboard for their system may not even be aware of it. It becomes clear that AMD and the board partners simply have to do a better job of communicating. The A620 platform offers enough PCIe lanes for two M.2 drives and enough space for peripherals as well as a few PCIe slots. However, most boards on the market seem to only offer a single M.2 slot with no apparent reason for this, aside from the cost of the physical interface, of course. It is suspected that AMD's board partners have tried to cut down on as many features as possible, which ends up making some boards barely fit for their intended purpose.

The future will show whether even better A620 boards will come onto the market. At the moment, however, it seems that AMD's board partners would rather sell a more expensive B650 board to their potential customers. The selection of boards presented on Friday is therefore described as weak. In summary, the platform's limitations can confuse potential buyers and AMD and its board partners need to make improvements here. It remains to be seen whether future boards will be more suitable. The current ones are probably not.

Source: AMD, TechPowerUp