About a year ago we put together a comprehensive roundup covering 35 motherboards based on the AMD B650 chipset, and at the time that was every single B650 board on the market. After months of work, we found that all B650 motherboards were fit for use with any AM5 processor, having tested them successfully with the Ryzen 9 7950X . That's a big deal as it means you can invest in the AM5 platform with confidence – not something budget builders can do with Intel – as numerous LGA 1700 boards (12th-14th-gen Core) have been found to run excessively hot, often resulting in thermal throttling, and therefore lost performance.
The fact that you could go AM5 for your next build in the comfort of knowing any Ryzen CPU released for the platform will work, is nice. Or at least it was nice while it lasted. Recently we've noticed a few new entry-level AMD B650 boards popping up from the likes of MSI, Gigabyte, and Asrock, and some of them don't look to flash.
Now, this sort of thing isn't that unusual. Motherboard makers release updated boards or even revisions of existing models all the time. But what is unusual here is that all the new additions are entry-level budget models – and they've all been released rather quietly.
So we've gone about snapping up these new motherboards for testing, and some of the results are very disappointing...
MSI Pro B650M-P We'll start with the new MSI Pro B650M-P , which currently costs just $120 . That's considerably less than their previous entry-lev.