As expected, AMD today officially launched the third 500-series chipset, the A520. It is designed for use in budget motherboards equipped with an AMD Socket AM4 processor socket.
The company points out that the A520 chipset is poised to provide an optimized, reliable platform with multiple connectivity options and high bandwidth to satisfy the most demanding home and office PC users.
An interesting feature of the new chipset is that it is currently only designed to work with AMD Zen 2-based processors – Ryzen 3000 (Matisse) and Ryzen 4000G (Renoir). It does not have support for previous generations of Ryzen chips.
According to AMD, the A520 chipset is also ready to accommodate upcoming AMD Ryzen desktop processors based on the Zen 3 architecture. The company does not indicate which chips are in question, but it is likely that it is Vermeer (Ryzen 4000), which will replace Matisse (Ryzen 3000) later this year, as well as the Cezanne APUs (Ryzen 5000G), which will replace the Renoir desktop APUs next year.
Unlike the older brothers in the face of the B550 and X570 chipsets, which offer support for the PCI Express 4.0 interface, the A520 logic is limited to support for PCI Express 3.0. AMD A520 motherboards are capable of providing up to 26 PCIe 3.0 lanes in systems with 3rd Gen Ryzen processors, AMD says. Considering the budget of the assemblies for which this chipset from AMD is designed, motherboards based on it will not be able to offer the installation of two video cards. It also claims support for up to five USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, up to six native USB 2.0 ports, up to two native USB 3.1, and up to four SATA 6 Gb / sports. Many motherboard manufacturers have already presented their new products on the AMD A520 chipset, made in various form factors. These include companies such as ASUS, ASRock, Biostar, Gigabyte, and MSI. All boards offer M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 connectors, some motherboards have Wi-Fi support, as well as RGB lighting. The boards are already on sale. Prices generally do not exceed $ 100.
