AMD’s Mainstream B850 & B840 Motherboards To Launch In Early 2025, Partner Showcase at CES

AMD's mainstream B850 & B840 chipset offerings for budget motherboards will take a slight pushback to early 2025.

Usually, AMD releases its high-end offerings before releasing the budget products and this has been the case for most of its CPU, motherboard, and GPU lineups. However, it was expected that AMD would soon follow up with the affordable 800 chipset motherboards in 2024, which now is reported to be pushed back to 2025. Instead, AMD is going to launch the X870 and X870E chipsets this year for its Ryzen 9000 series CPUs.

As reported by ComputerBase, AMD will be launching the B850 and B840 chipset motherboards in the early part of 2025. However, the X870 and X870E are planned to launch in September which we reported to be on the 30th of September.

AMD already released its Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 chips this month and many motherboard manufacturers have prepared their X870/X870E chipset motherboards for launch in September.

The reason for the widened launch window between high-end and mainstream chips is unknown but this means that users on a budget will have to either settle with the already existing B650 or B650E chipset or wait for the upcoming 800 chipset motherboards. The 600 chipset motherboards will need to be updated to support the latest Ryzen 9000 processors but the 800 chipset boards will come with an already updated BIOS for full compatibility. One reason could be more mainstream CPU options that might be available next year so it makes more sense to align the launch with those offerings.

This is also the first time we are seeing an X40 series chipset, which will be limited to PCI-E 3.0 support. The B840 chipset looks like the successor to the Ax20 chipset, which is an entry-level chipset for previous Ryzen CPUs. The B850 is the successor to the B650 chipset but it's not yet known officially if AMD has plans to release the B850E chipset. The X870/X870E and B850 chipsets will allow CPU overclocking while the B840 won't.

This is pretty much similar to what has been going on with their predecessors. The AMD X870 and X870E chipset motherboards will come with native PCI-E 5.0 support and will be competing with Intel's Z790 as per AMD. However, the X870/E will most likely compete with Z890 motherboards for Arrow Lake CPUs since Zen 5 will be competing with newer Intel processors. The Z890 motherboards are confirmed to launch on 17th October, just a few weeks after the X870/X870E hits the market.