AMD’s brand-new AM5 socket and 600-series chipsets are almost here, with new features and more performance across the board.
Alongside the announcement of Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, AMD also announced the brand-new AM5 socket and 600-series chipsets that AM5 boards will feature. These new motherboards for Ryzen 7000 will bring new features and more performance across the board. To get you up to speed, we rounded up everything you need to know about AM5 and X670. You’ll need one of these new motherboards if you plan to upgrade to Ryzen 7000 later this year, so it’s best to start planning now. AMD announced the new AM5 socket back in January, but didn’t disclose any new features. That wasn’t because there weren’t many new features to talk about, thankfully, as AM5 has plenty of them. The new socket brings support for DDR5 memory and will feature 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes, which are twice as fast as PCIe 4.0 lanes. Unlike Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs, there won’t be support for DDR4 memory, so upgrading to DDR5 is a must. With socket AM5, AMD is switching from a PGA (pin grid array) socket to an LGA (land grid array) socket. LGA sockets support more pins, and AM5 comes with 1,718 of them. That could bloat the cost of motherboards as we’ve seen with some Intel motherboards since the pins are on the motherboard. X670 and B650 motherboards will have up to 14 USB ports at 20Gbps each, and support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. AMD is also bumping up the number of displays you can connect to the motherboard from two to four (either HDMI 2.
