AMD’s partners will be taking advantage of GAMESCOM’s opening in a few hours’ time to unveil their new Ryzen 9000 motherboard ranges in full. In particular, Asus and MSI have scheduled a special event for the launch of the X870 / X870E boards that will accompany the new CPU range. It’s going to be interesting to see what these new boards really bring, as the details of the chipsets have also left us perplexed… On paper, we’d simply be looking at a renaming of the current range, with no real additional functionality.
Finally, it’s important to consider the context, as the launch of the Ryzen 9000 is not taking place calmly and serenely. Several of AMD’s partners have expressed concern about the sales of this new generation. More generally, many of them are hoping for a rapid arrival of the X3D versions, which were AMD’s lifeline for the previous generation.
X870E = X670E and X870 = B650E?
Returning to AMD motherboards, we raised the possibility of a simply rebadged range at the beginning of June this year. When we analyzed the technical specifications, we had a few surprises in store. To find anything really new, you really had to dig deep to discover that USB4 is now still available on motherboards equipped with the X870E (via an additional chip). As far as the X870 is concerned, it’s almost worse, since we’d simply be looking at a B650E with a lick of paint. Here again, data analysis is implacable. A comparison of the “new” X870 with the X670 sheds some light: not only does it offer USB4, but also PCIe 5.0 instead of PCIe 4.0 for the graphics card. It’s hard to imagine that AMD has changed its tune since the June news. If this is unfortunately the case, it’s doubtful that the Ryzen 9000 / X870 combo will attract much interest…
