A few days ago, AMD finally announced the Ryzen 7000 series, featuring the AM5 socket and motherboard platform, which will debut with four motherboard series, two of them based on the B650 socket. It's known and widely assumed that all of them will support DDR5 memory because AMD has unilaterally decided to drop support for DDR4 memory to avoid having to maintain it during this motherboard generation, and they will all have PCIe slots up to version 5.0. It's safe to assume that major manufacturers are involved in producing these motherboards, with Asus being one of them, and its initial catalog of Ryzen 7000 motherboards has reportedly been leaked.
According to a report by HardwareLuxx, one of its forum members has managed to uncover information about seven Asus B650 and B650E motherboards. These boards range from a single Prime model to several TUF Gaming variants and two ROG Strix models. All of the motherboards support PCIe 5.0, and one of them supports up to four M.2 SSDs.
This would be Asus's plans for B650 motherboards
These leaked Asus motherboards include the Prime B650-Plus, TUF Gaming B650M-Plus, TUF Gaming B650M-Plus WiFi, TUF Gaming B650-Plus, TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi, ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi, and the ROG Strix B650E-E Gaming WiFi. The two TUF motherboards that carry the “B650M” nomenclature are said to be Micro-ATX motherboards, while the rest are said to be ATX form factor boards.
The B650 would be AMD's new mid-range chipset option for its first generation of AM5 motherboards. The chipset has gone from being the X670 to supporting PCIe 5.0 in a single M.2 slot. The B650E would support PCIe 5.0 in the main PCIe x16 slot for the graphics card and at least one M.2 slot.
AMD claims that the performance between the B650 and X670 chipset series will be the same. This would mean that the only differences are related to PCIe connectivity and, potentially, the I/O ports each model will have, depending on the motherboard manufacturers.
According to the motherboard model data source, the Prime B650-Plus and the twin TUF Gaming B650M motherboards will offer the least storage connectivity, limited to just two M.2 slots, one of which is PCIe 5.0 compatible. Meanwhile, the ATX variants of the TUF Gaming motherboards, along with the ROG Strix B650-A, will have a third M.2 slot, for a total of two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and a single Gen 5 slot.
In the case of the ROG Strix B650E-E, Asus would have configured it to have not only a single PCIe Gen 5 x16 slot, but two x16 slots connected for Gen 5. M.2 storage would have been upgraded to four slots. in total, three of them being compatible with Gen 4 and one with Gen 5.
Source: Tom's Hardware
