AMD Unveils X870 and X870E Motherboards for Ryzen 9000 CPUs

Enhanced Features for High Performance

The X870 and X870E chipsets come standard with USB 4.0 and PCIe 5.0, providing greater bandwidth for supported graphics cards and NVMe SSDs. They also support higher EXPO memory overclocking, allowing users to fully leverage the capabilities of the best DDR5 RAM in their systems.

Backward Compatibility and Future-Proofing

Designed with the recently unveiled Ryzen 9000 series in mind, these two chipsets are backward compatible with older AM5 chipsets. This means that even if you’re considering a CPU upgrade, you won’t necessarily need to opt for these latest offerings, as the Ryzen 9000 line will work with existing x670 boards.

The Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs

AMD also announced the full stack of the AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, which seems to be more of an iteration than an innovation. The lineup includes the leading Ryzen 9 9950X, the high-end Ryzen 9 9900X, the mid-range Ryzen 7 9700X, and the entry-level Ryzen 9600X. While they may appear similar to their 7000 series counterparts at first glance, they could offer a performance boost of anywhere from 10 to 35%.

Quality-of-Life Improvements

Much like the Ryzen 9000 series chips themselves, the X870 and X870E motherboards offer subtle improvements with new quality-of-life tweaks. With Gen 5.0 NVMe SSDs getting faster and higher EXPO memory clock support, you’ll be able to push faster DDR5 RAM kit capacities further than ever before.

The Future of Graphics Cards

Lastly, the introduction of PCIe 5.0 for graphics cards means you’ll have double the available data transfer rates compared to PCIe 4.0 for the x16 port. This will be particularly important for the future of the best graphics cards, such as the potential RDNA 4 line and Nvidia’s successor.