Gamers who want to build an affordable Ryzen 9000 series system with a B850 motherboard will have to wait a long time

ComputerBase reports that gamers who want to build a Ryzen 9000 series system with a B850 or B840 affordable motherboard will have to wait a long time. Motherboards with budget-friendly chipsets will not be available before 2025, according to a report from ComputerBase.

The X870E and X870 options are set to hit the market in a few weeks. However, given their features and specifications, they will not be cheap.

AMD has always said that it would stagger its release of new chipsets. It's still a bit disappointing that the new chipsets are being released so slowly, especially since B850 boards would add an extra incentive for mainstream users.

You can use any B650 or B650E board (or A620 for that matter) if you have a CPU such as the Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 chip. However, the BIOS may not be updated to support the new chips. Not all boards offer a CPU-less BIOS Flashback option.

AMD revealed the B850 motherboards' base specifications at a recent PC Gamer media event. The B850 motherboards don't seem to be a huge improvement over B650E boards, but their Gen 5 NVMe support and 20Gbps USB will make them more competitive than cheaper B650 models. These boards will also feature WiFi 7, and more powerful VRMs and cooling solutions, at least on the premium models.

B840 motherboards are less exciting and may even be inferior to A620 boards. AMD's PCIe Gen 3 preliminary specification is not likely to appeal to anyone but those with a very limited budget. This could limit their use with graphics cards that have an x8 PCIe link or x4 PCIe links, which are the cards that budget gamers are likely to buy.

We saw X870 board teased at Computex almost three months ago. We can expect B850 boards to be teased towards the year's end, with a full show at CES 2025 very likely.