AMD and Intel launch mainstream and budget motherboard chipsets at CES but some of the codenames are so similar that I've already mistaken them for each other

A screenshot from a promotional video for ASRock B860 motherboards

(Image credit: ASRock)

It's taken a while to happen, especially in the case of AMD, but at long last, we're seeing new mainstream and budget motherboards for Zen 5 and Arrow Lake processors at CES. The stars of the show sport the B850 and B860 chipsets, but given that the names are almost identical, there's probably going to be no end of confusion resulting in products being returned to retailers. That's because B850 is AMD-only and B860 is Intel-only. Obviously.

In the case of the former, AMD actually announced the B850 chipset back in July 2024, with the launch of the Zen 5 CPU architecture, but it's taken until now for motherboards using it to appear. ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are all showing off new models at CES, and I have one in for testing already.

While AMD X870/E motherboards all come with PCIe 5.0 graphics card and primary SSD slots, B850 boards are only required to support PCIe 4.0 for both as standard, though many offer Gen5. It's a similar story regarding USB4—mandatory for X870/E boards, optional for B850.

The similarity between the codenames means that there are certainly going to be cases where someone accidentally orders the wrong motherboard—the best-case scenario just results in a quick return to the retailer, and the worst-case scenario involves someone trying to jam an AMD CPU into an Intel socket or vice versa.

A promotional image showing a collection of Asus B850 motherboards — (Image credit: Asus)

Down at the bottom end of the chipset scale, you've got AMD's B840 and Intel's H810. The latter is better than the former but unless you're really working with a very tight budget, neither are great options for building a cheap gaming PC. You're better off with last-gen products that can be bought for a much lower price than at launch.

As these new motherboards have only just been launched, there aren't many in stores just yet so you might want to wait a month or two just to what the reviews of them are like. I suspect some of them are going to be quite expensive, though, so you may well be better off getting an X870 or Z890 board if you get more features for the same money. We'll let you know once we have more info.

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?