The price of constructing a Ryzen 7000 PC is fairly excessive. The CPUs are costly (although not fairly as costly as Ryzen 5000 when it got here out), DDR5 RAM hasn’t come down in worth but, and the one motherboards you may purchase at launch had been high-end X670 and X670E boards with options that most individuals didn’t want or need.
Since cheaper Ryzen 7000 CPUs could be an extended methods off and since DDR5 reminiscence will take some time to get cheaper, AMD’s midrange B650 and B650E chipsets seemed promising for reducing the price of constructing a Ryzen 7000 PC. Motherboards with these midrange chipsets are lastly out there, however the affordability many had been hoping for hasn’t materialized.
Cheaper, however not by a lot
At the time of writing, the cheapest X670 motherboards cost just under $300, and many are easily $400 or more. If you bought a Ryzen 5 7600X, a CPU that straddles the line between midrange and high-end, you might actually end up spending more on the board than the processor, which is not exactly ideal. When AMD promised B650 boards would start at $125, it seemed like people could actually start building relatively affordable Ryzen 7000 PCs.
While the B650 and B650E are cheaper than the X670 and X670E, they barely get into the midrange territory that old B350, B450, and B550 boards were in and totally miss the promised $125 mark. ASRock’s B650M PG Riptide motherboard is the cheapest you can currently find on Newegg, and it costs $169. In fact, most B650 boards seem to cost between $200 and $300, which isn’t all that much lower than the X670. Even MSI’s Tomahawk, which in previous generations was lauded for its low price, is now $259.
It doesn’t seem like this is due to inflated pricing or lack of supply either. WccfTech writer Hassan Mujtaba shared a list of Gigabyte’s B650 and B650E motherboards with their respective MSRPs, and the most cost effective one is $159. Most sit across the $250 mark, and the corporate’s B650E Aorus Grasp is $349. Mujtaba additionally reported that Newegg is promoting all B650 and B650E motherboards at MSRP, ruling out provide points.
Some B650 and B650E motherboards are much more costly than X670 boards. On Newegg, the MSI MPG B650 Carbon is $329 and ASRock’s B650E Taichi is an eye-watering $449. I don’t consider we’ve ever noticed such excessive costs for older B collection chipsets for Ryzen CPUs.
Disappointing, however not fully out of left area
This isn’t the primary time AMD has disenchanted folks with midrange motherboards. Again when AMD launched Ryzen 3000, the one new chipset out there was X570, which was a high-end answer just like the X670. It took practically a yr for the B550 to launch, and when it did, the actually low cost fashions that had been lower than $150 bought out in a short time.
That’s not the identical drawback B650 has, although. There have been B550 boards with MSRPs of lower than $100 in 2020, and it’s not a shock that inventory was so low since this was in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, when provide was at its worst. As we speak, only a few B650 boards are out of inventory on Newegg, and thus far we don’t have any indication we’ll see B650 boards carrying MSRPs that rival the B550.
The excessive MSRPs for the B650 and B650E motherboards aren’t precisely stunning. For years, AMD has been focusing on higher-end CPUs with higher price tags, shifting away from its traditionally strong presence in the budget and midrange segments. AMD used to launch CPUs and chipsets from the low-end to the high-end almost as soon as a new generation came out. Nowadays, AMD waits months or even over a year to launch new products for the low-end and midrange.
What concerns me the most is what this implies about upcoming Ryzen 7000 CPUs. AMD had to have known that high RAM and motherboard prices would be a big turnoff to consumers with a limited budget, but what if AMD has no plans to launch budget CPUs to begin with? We saw it with Ryzen 5000, which started at $299 with the Ryzen 5 5600X. Intel finally forced AMD’s hand with cheap 12th-gen CPUs that covered the $100 to $300 price range that Ryzen 5000 neglected.
At the very least, AMD’s message with B650 and B650E is pretty clear: if you want to build a cheap Ryzen PC, buy Ryzen 5000, because Ryzen 7000 isn’t for you.
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