AMD and its partners within the Socket AM5 platform presented the Junior A620 chipset and motherboards based on it. These boards start at $85, which is 32% cheaper than the cheapest AMD B650 boards. A feature of motherboards with the A620 is the lack of official support for the PCIe 5.0 interface for graphics cards and SSDs. Nevertheless, ASRock’s Pro RS series boards offer full support for PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives.
Image source: ASRock
All motherboards based on the AMD A620 chipset presented by various manufacturers to date have a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot for a graphics card and one or more PCIe x1 versions 3.0 and 4.0. Also, most come with just one PCIe 4.0 x4 slot for NVMe drives, although the A620 chipset itself supports two such slots.
According to Wccftech, the $100 ASRock A620M Pro RS WIFI motherboard comes with dual M.2 connectors. At the same time, it offers full support for SSD with PCIe 5.0. This was evidenced by screenshots provided by insiders. They show the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 paired with a PCIe 5.0 SSD installed on the indicated board by CFD Gaming.
Image source: Wccftech
According to CrystalDisk and ATTO tests, the drive fully supports PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 and, according to ATTO, even demonstrates the declared speed of 10 GB/s on a budget motherboard. As you know, the maximum bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 interface is 8GB/s, and PCIe 5.0 interface supports transfer rate up to 16GB/s.
Image source: Wccftech
In a conversation with representatives of motherboard manufacturers, Wccftech found out that boards based on the A620 chipset can certainly support PCIe 5.0 drives. The same ASRock Pro RS series motherboards are equipped with all the necessary hardware to provide such support.
The main limitations related to the lack of official support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs on boards with the A620 chipset are related to AMD’s own decision. In order for the new PCIe standard to work on boards with the A620 chipset, not only must the hardware requirements be met, but the BIOS must also be flashed to a special version of the AGESA libraries. ASRock developed the BIOS on this version. However, future updates of such libraries are questionable. In other words, with the release of new BIOS versions, these ASRock boards may lose support for PCIe 5.0 drives if AMD decides to do so.
Image source: AMD
As seen in one of AMD’s presentation slides, the company is positioning the A620 chipset to work with the PCIe 4.0 interface and the SSDs that use it. The presence of support for PCIe 5.0 drives here seems simply inconvenient, since a PC based on Ryzen 7000 (processor, RAM and motherboard) can already be assembled for 400-500 dollars. Adding a PCIe 5.0 SSD costs 2/3 of that price.
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