AM5 motherboards for Ryzen 7000 CPUs finally hit $125

ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2
(Image credit: ASRock)

It's been a long time coming, nearly five months to be precise, but you can now get AM5 motherboards for $125. We give you the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2.

Back when AMD released the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and their new AM5 platform last year, AMD said motherboard pricing would start at $125. In fact, prices kicked off way higher than that and it's only now that AMD's promise has come true.

Funnily enough, it's AMD itself that has shouted out the new pricing and even called itself out for tardiness in hitting that $125 target.

As for the $125 board in question, perhaps not surprisingly it comes from ASRock, ever the purveyor of appealingly priced PC components. The ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 is up for precisely $124.99 on Newegg and the immediate question is just how cut down it is to hit that price point.

For starters, it's a Micro-ATX board, which automatically limits connectivity. So, you get just two DIMM slots for memory, a total of just seven USB ports and four SATA sockets. However, the good news is that there are two 2280 length M.2 slots for speedy storage, one PCIe Gen 5 spec, the other PCIe Gen 4.

The Realtek ALC897 audio chip isn't exactly cutting edge, but hey there's a 2.5Gb ethernet port, DisplayPort and HDMI and USB-C. So, in reality, it's got most connectivity needs fairly well covered.

Even better, there's an M.2 Wi-Fi slot and antenna mounting points ready for your wireless networking setup of choice. Sure that adds to the cost. But if you already have an M.2 E Wi-Fi card, you can move it over to this new board. Anyway, we wouldn't really expect Wi-Fi as standard given the price point.

Overall, though we're never in love with the idea of going with Micro-ATX on the basis of cost, the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 does look like a viable option, especially thanks to the dual M.2 storage slots.

With DDR5 memory having also come down a lot since Ryzen 7000 launched, the cutting edge mobo, CPU and memory trifecta in AMD flavour now looks pretty attainable. It's just a pity that the final piece of the puzzle, graphics, remains painfully pricey.

Indeed, you could grab this motherboard, a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU and 32GB of DDR5 RAM for about $600. That's a lot less than you'll pay for an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT alone, even with its latest price drop to $799. So it goes.

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Jeremy Laird
Hardware writer

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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