AMD has already confirmed that its new Zen 5 CPUs will be released in July 2024, but it looks as though it’s planning to launch its supporting new motherboards later in the year. According to the latest leak, the AMD X870 motherboard release date is expected to come a couple of months after its first new Ryzen 9000 CPUs come out.
With AMD going big on the latest PCIe 5.0 and USB 4 standards in its new X870 and X870E chipsets, it’s likely these new chipsets will power several of the best gaming motherboards you can buy when they come out. You won’t need one of these new motherboards to run a Ryzen 9000-series Zen 5 CPU, though, as they’ll also happily slot into any existing Socket AM5 motherboard, as long as you flash the BIOS first.
This latest leak comes courtesy of tech site Wccftech, which claims to have spoken to anonymous sources in the industry, who have reportedly confirmed that the AMD X870 motherboard release date is September 30, 2024.
If this rumor is true, that means we could potentially see AMD’s new X870 and X870E motherboards coming out at the same time as AMD’s new Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs with 3D V-cache, which are rumored to be coming out in a similar timeframe.
While plenty of AMD’s current Socket AM5 motherboards, based on the X670E, X670, and B650 chipsets, already support PCIe 5.0 and USB 4, these chipset releases see these new connections becoming standard.
In particular, the new X870 chipset now has 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes at its disposal, compared with just eight on the previous X670 chipset. That means an X870 motherboard can now not only support a full 16x PCIe 5.0 graphics slot, but it can also accommodate the latest super-fast 4x PCIe 5.0 SSDs, such as the Crucial T705, at the same time.
Both the new chipsets also now support the new faster USB 4 connection as a standard feature, when it was previously only an optional extra that could be added by a motherboard manufacturer. USB 4 offers up to 40Gbps of bandwidth, which is double the speed of the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interface.
Meanwhile, the flagship X870E chipset offers more high-speed USB ports than the X870 chipset, along with eight more PCIe 4.0 lanes, and four more SATA ports. However, unlike X670, the standard X870 chipset looks set to cover all the essentials if you want to build a PC with a high spec in 2024.
AMD also promises that X870 and X870E motherboards will be able to support higher memory clock speeds than their predecessors, using its EXPO RAM profile system. Several motherboard makers were showing off their new X870 and X870E motherboards at Computex when we went to the tradeshow, including the new Gigabyte X870E Aorus Xtreme, which is pictured above.
In the meantime, if you want to buy a new gaming CPU right now, our top recommendation is the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which offers fantastic gaming performance thanks to its massive stack of cache.