AMD's B-series chipset will remain the home of budget Ryzen overclocking
Published: 24th May 2022 | Source: Robert Hallock - Via Brad Chacos | Author: Mark Campbell
AM5's B650 chipset will support overclocking, AMD confirms
When AMD revealed their B650, X670, and X670E AM5 motherboard chipsets, AMD's marketing slides stated that their X670 chipset was for "enthusiast overclocking", leaving many to assume that AMD's lower-end B650 chipset would not support overclocking. Thankfully, this is not the case.
AMD has officially confirmed that their B650 chipset will support overclocking, which is great news for mainstream Ryzen 7000 series CPU owners. Overclocking will not be restricted to AMD's higher-end chipsets, allowing budget-oriented PC builders to unlock the potential of their AM5 processors.
While overclocking will be supported on B650, AMD's mainstream AM5 chipset will have its downsides when compared to X670 and X670E. PCIe 5.0 support will be restricted exclusively to storage, with motherboards likely supporting only a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. Your motherboard's primary PCIe 16x slot will be limited to PCIe 4.0 data rates, which could limit the potential of future PCIe 5.0 compatible graphics cards. That said, PCIe 4.0 speeds is plenty fast for most modern use cases over a 16x PCIe slot.
So no, AMD are not downgrading their B650 chipset by removing support for overclocking. AMD is committed to allowing its users to overclock their processors on their mainstream AM5 chipset. That said, X670 and X670E motherboards will be built with overclocking headroom in mind, and will likely feature beefier VRM heatsinks, more power phases and other overclocking-oriented design features. There's a reason why AMD says that X670 is designed for "enthusiast overclocking".
You can join the discussion on AMD's confirmation that their B650 chipset will support overclocking on the OC3D Forums .